The Life, the Sea and the Space Viking, trailers released | SETI Institute
http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/news/life-sea-and-space-viking-trailers-released

In the coming weeks, the SETI Institute will release some of the short videos and trailers developed
in house at the SETI Institute by our Designer of Experiences Nelly Ben Hayoun as part of the project
The Life, the Sea and the Space Viking which deals with the contemporary debates on astrobiology and
terraforming. Two areas of expertise developed at the SETI Institute by our world class scientists.

COMING SOON / THE LIFE THE SEA AND THE SPACE VIKING TRAILER
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvt9ygJkV2o

Layered Bedrock in the Center of a 15-Kilometer Diameter Impact Crater
https://vimeo.com/189830976

A Periodic Table for Black Hole Orbits
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5324963/a-periodic-table-for-black-hole-orbits/
Physicist Janna Levin last year published a paper where she offers a way to understand what happens to objects trapped
in the intense gravitational field around rotating black holes. As this chart shows, there are many paths to the singularity.

Rains of Terror on Exoplanet HD 189733b
http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/rains-of-terror-on-exoplanet-hd-189733b

Very bright, greenish fireball spotted over the Niigata Airport, Japan on October 31, 2016
Green light-emitting body Niigata airport sky of Japan is passing fireball? UFO?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDBeNcwzLOQ&feature=youtu.be

Indonesia's Sinabung erupts again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdwLseImXSI&feature=youtu.be

Mount Rainier Volcano is a Ticking Time Bomb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Me_s0b-w7FY

Did Early Earth Spin On Its Side? | SETI Institute
http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/press-release/did-early-earth-spin-its-side

New theoretical modeling of the ancient history of the Earth and the Moon suggests that the giant collision
that spawned our natural satellite may have left Earth spinning very fast, and with its spin axis highly tilted.

Computer simulations of what followed the collision, sometimes referred to as the “big whack,” show that, following this event,
and as the young Moon’s orbit was getting bigger, the Earth lost much of its spin as well gained a nearly upright orientation with
respect to the ecliptic. The simulations give new insight into the question of whether planets with big moons are more likely to
have moderate climates and life.

“Despite smart people working on this problem for fifty years, we’re still discovering surprisingly basic things about the earliest
history of our world,” says Matija Cuk a scientist at the SETI Institute and lead researcher for the simulations. “It’s quite humbling.”

Since the nineteenth century, scientists have known that the Moon is gradually moving away from Earth and that or planet’s spin is
simultaneously slowing down. The cause is the ocean tides raised by the Moon which slowly dissipate energy as they move across the ocean
basins. This energy has to come from somewhere, resulting in a slowing down of Earth’s rotation, with our days very slowly getting longer.

The World's Largest Telescope Might Not Be Built in Hawaii After All
http://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-largest-telescope-might-not-be-built-in-hawa-1788421398

As a bitter, multi-year battle over the legality of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) rages on, an alternate path forward has begun to emerge.
The world’s largest telescope may not wind up on the frosty peak of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, but instead it might be placed in Spain’s Canary Islands.
It’d be a loss for astronomy, but a major win for Hawaiian cultural practitioners who don’t want their sacred mountain marred by gigantic machines.

New Instrument Could Search for Signatures of Life on Mars
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/new-instrument-could-search-for-signatures-of-life-on-mars
A sensing technique that the U.S. military currently uses to remotely monitor the air to detect potentially life-threatening chemicals, toxins, and pathogens
has inspired a new instrument that could “sniff” for life on Mars and other targets in the solar system -- the Bio-Indicator Lidar Instrument, or BILI.

Mystery solved behind birth of Saturn’s rings | Kobe University
http://www.kobe-u.ac.jp/en/NEWS/research/2016_10_31_01.html

A team of researchers has presented a new model for the origin of Saturn’s rings based on results of computer simulations. The results of the simulations are also applicable to rings
of other giant planets and explain the compositional differences between the rings of Saturn and Uranus. The findings were published on October 6 in the online version of Icarus.

The lead author of the paper is HYODO Ryuki (Kobe University, Graduate School of Science), and co-authors are Professor Sébastien Charnoz (Institute de Physique du Globe/Université Paris
Diderot), Professor OHTSUKI Keiji (Kobe University, Graduate School of Science), and Project Associate Professor GENDA Hidenori (Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology).

The present study focused on the period called the Late Heavy Bombardment that is believed to have occurred 4 billion years ago in our solar system, when the giant planets underwent orbital
migration. It is thought that several thousand Pluto-sized (one fifth of Earth’s size) objects from the Kuiper belt existed in the outer solar system beyond Neptune. First the researchers
calculated the probability that these large objects passed close enough to the giant planets to be destroyed by their tidal force during the Late Heavy Bombardment. Results showed that
Saturn, Uranus and Neptune experienced close encounters with these large celestial objects multiple times.

Next the group used computer simulations to investigate disruption of these Kuiper belt objects by tidal force when they passed the vicinity of the giant planets (see Figure 2a). The results
of the simulations varied depending on the initial conditions, such as the rotation of the passing objects and their minimum approach distance to the planet. However they discovered that in
many cases fragments comprising 0.1-10% of the initial mass of the passing objects were captured into orbits around the planet (see Figures 2a, b). The combined mass of these captured
fragments was found to be sufficient to explain the mass of the current rings around Saturn and Uranus. In other words, these planetary rings were formed when sufficiently large objects
passed very close to giants and were destroyed.

Hypervariable galactic nuclei
http://phys.org/news/2016-10-hypervariable-galactic-nuclei.html

Extreme variability in the intensity of the optical light of galaxies, by factors of two or more, is of great interest to astronomers. It can flag the presence
of rare types of supernovae, for example, or spot sudden accretion activity around quiescent black holes or around the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's
nucleus. In recent years systematic searches for such variability have been made using instruments that can survey wide swaths of the sky. One, the Panoramic
Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (PanSTARRS), is a facility capable very wide-field imaging using a combination of relatively small mirrors coupled
with very large digital cameras, and it can observe the entire sky accessible to it several times a month.

CfA astronomer Martin Elvis was part of a team of scientists that looked for variability in galaxies by comparing PanSTARRS images of the sky with images taken
by an earlier survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, about ten years before; the results were followed up with several other telescopes. Their comparison spanned
nearly one-third of the whole sky. After sifting through thousands of apparent transients per month to check, among other things, for accurate spatial coincidences,
that the candidates were galaxies, and that multiple observations confirmed the variability, the team reports finding seventy-six reliable objects. Spectroscopic
followups and other observations were then able to classify these into nine categories, including supernovae and radio-emitting galaxies. In the end, the team
found fifteen hypervariable sources that have brightened by almost a factor of ten in the past decade; light from the most distant one of these has been
traveling for about nine billion years. The galaxies' light is blue in color and has been steadily changing, usually getting weaker.

Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO2ubCR3suE

Gaia spies two temporarily magnified stars
http://phys.org/news/2016-10-gaia-spies-temporarily-magnified-stars.html

While scanning the sky to measure the position of over one billion stars in our Galaxy, ESA's Gaia satellite has detected
two rare instances of stars whose light was temporarily boosted by other celestial objects passing across their lines of
sight. One of these stars is expected to brighten again soon. Gaia's measurements will be instrumental to learn more about
the nature of these 'cosmic magnifying glasses'.

Space debris: how many operating, dysfunctional & dead satellites & spacecrafts orbiting our planet (per country)