Kennedy Team Briefed on Juno Mission Progress | Kennedy Space Center
https://blogs.nasa.gov/kennedy/2016/09/22/kennedy-team-briefed-on-juno-mission-progress/

Since its arrival in orbit around Jupiter nearly three months ago, the Juno spacecraft already is impressing scientists
with its observations of the gas giant. Employees at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida were briefed on the status
and the scientific promise of a mission many audience members helped launch a little more than five years ago.

What Is The Physics Of Nothing?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/09/22/what-is-the-physics-of-nothing/#772136751451

Phoenix Planets: Some 'Tatooine' Worlds May Rise from Stellar Ashes
http://www.space.com/34134-phoenix-tatooine-planets-rise-from-star-ashes.html

A new study reveals that the most massive worlds occur nearly as often around tight pairs of stars as they do around singles. While most planets
that orbit one star came into being along with their sun, some of the worlds orbiting two tightly paired objects may have come from one of the stars' debris.

"Because of the challenges they present, binary stars have been for a long time neglected," Mariangela Bonavita, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh
in the United Kingdom, told Space.com. Bonavita examined a number of stellar surveys, including The Search for Planets Orbiting Two Stars (SPOTS), to which
Bonavita contributed, to hunt for worlds around pairs of stars.

Intersecting Channels near Olympica Fossae
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpkBP-0OAjc


HiRISE | Intersecting Channels near Olympica Fossae (ESP_045091_2045)
http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_045091_2045

Ask Nima Veiseh what he was doing for any day in the past 15 years, however, and he will give you the minutiae
of the weather, what he was wearing, or even what side of the train he was sitting on his journey to work.

“My memory is like a library of VHS tapes, walk-throughs of every day of my life from waking to sleeping,” he explains.

BBC - Future - The blessing and curse of the people who never forget
http://www.bbc.com/...tory/20160125-the-blessing-and-curse-of-the-people-who-never-forget?ocid=fbfut

Chemically peculiar star HR8844 could be a hybrid object
http://phys.org/news/2016-09-chemically-peculiar-star-hr8844-hybrid.html

Astronomers from the Paris Observatory in Meudon, France and the Notre Dame University – Louaize in Zouk Mosbeh, Lebanon, report that an A-type
main-sequence star HR8844, could be a hybrid object between two classes of chemically peculiar stars. The discovery was detailed in a paper
published Sept. 16 on arXiv.org.

Previous studies described HR8844 as a slowly rotating, fairly bright (V=5.89), superficially normal A0V star. However, the latest research
conducted by Richard Monier of the Paris Observatory and his colleagues sheds new light on the real nature of this star.

Vanished star may be first known failed supernova | Science News
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vanished-star-may-be-first-known-failed-supernova

A star that mysteriously disappeared might be the first confirmed case of a failed supernova, a star that tried to
explode but couldn’t finish the job. A newborn black hole appears to have been left behind to snack on the star’s remains.

In 2009, a star in the galaxy NGC 6946 flared up over several months to become over 1 million times as bright as the sun. Then, it seemed to vanish.
While the star could just be hiding behind a wall of dust, new observations with the Hubble Space Telescope, reported online September 6 at arXiv.org,
strongly suggest that the star did not survive. A faint trickle of infrared light, however, emanates from where the star used to be. The remnant glow
probably comes from debris falling onto a black hole that formed when the star died, write Caltech astronomer Scott Adams and colleagues.

What can an equation tell us about whether or not we're alone in the universe?

Will We Ever Find Intelligent Alien Life?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YmiRfCDeNg

KELT-16b: a new benchmark for future exoplanet atmosphere studies | astrobites
https://astrobites.org/2016/09/20/kelt-16b-a-new-benchmark-for-future-exoplanet-atmosphere-studies/
KELT-16b was discovered by the The Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT; see astrobite here).
The KELT program is composed of two small ground-based telescopes: one in the North hemisphere, and
the other in the South. KELT searches for nearby transiting exoplanets by continuously surveying the
observable sky. Being a wide-angle survey, KELT is best suited at finding massive planets orbiting
close-by their host star—i.e., hot Jupiters similar to KELT-16b.

The discovery light curve of KELT-16b, containing over 5000 observations (black points) by the KELT-North telescope over six years, phase
folded to the best fit orbital period (about 0.97 days). The red points show the same data binned to 8min bins. Figure 1 from the paper.

'False' biosignatures may complicate search for ancient life on Earth, other planets | CU Boulder Today | University of Colorado Boulder
http://www.colorado.edu/...alse-biosignatures-may-complicate-search-ancient-life-earth-other-planets
Self-assembling carbon microstructures created in a lab by University of Colorado Boulder researchers could provide new clues –
and new cautions – in efforts to identify microbial life preserved in the fossil record, both on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system.

The geological search for ancient life frequently zeroes in on fossilized organic structures or biominerals that can serve as “biosignatures,”
that survive in the rock record over extremely long time scales. Mineral elements such as sulfur are often formed through biological activity.
Microbes can also produce a variety of telltale extracellular structures that resemble sheaths and stalks.

However, according to new findings published today in the journal Nature Communications, carbon-sulfur microstructures that would be recognized
today by some experts as biomaterials are capable of self-assembling under certain conditions, even without direct biological activity. These
“false” biosignatures could potentially be misinterpreted as signs of biological activity due to their strong resemblance to microbial structures.

“Surprisingly, we found that we could create all sorts of biogenic-like materials that have the right shape, structure and chemistry to match
natural materials we assume are produced biologically,” said Associate Professor Alexis Templeton of CU Boulder’s Department of Geological
Sciences and senior author of the new study.