Jednání s Ministrem životního prostředí přináší naději na zlepšení stavu v České republice | Světelné znečištění | Články | Astronomický informační server astro.cz
http://www.astro.cz/...avu-v-ceske-republice.html?utm_source=news&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=clanky

VIRGO: A version of the periodic table, color-coded by origin of the elements, via Jennifer Johnson.

The Elements of Life Mapped Across the Milky Way by SDSS/APOGEE | SDSS | Press Releases
http://www.sdss.org/press-releases/the-elements-of-life-mapped-across-the-milky-way-by-sdssapogee/

“For the first time, we can now study the distribution of elements across our Galaxy,” says Sten Hasselquist of New Mexico State University.
“The elements we measure include the atoms that make up 97% of the mass of the human body.”

The new results come from a catalog of more than 150,000 stars; for each star, it includes the amount of each of almost two dozen chemical elements.
The new catalog includes all of the so-called “CHNOPS elements” – carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur – known to be the building
blocks of all life on Earth. This is the first time that measurements of all of the CHNOPS elements have been made for such a large number of stars.

How do we know how much of each element a star contains? Of course, astronomers cannot visit stars to spoon up a sample of what they’re made of, so they
instead use a technique called spectroscopy to make these measurements. This technique splits light – in this case, light from distant stars – into detailed
rainbows (called spectra). We can work out how much of each element a star contains by measuring the depths of the dark and bright patches in the spectra
caused by different elements.

Astronomers in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have made these observations using the APOGEE (Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment) spectrograph
on the 2.5m Sloan Foundation Telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. This instrument collects light in the near-infrared part of the electromagnetic
spectrum and disperses it, like a prism, to reveal signatures of different elements in the atmospheres of stars. A fraction of the almost 200,000 stars surveyed
by APOGEE overlap with the sample of stars targeted by the NASA Kepler mission, which was designed to find potentially Earth-like planets. The work presented
today focuses on ninety Kepler stars that show evidence of hosting rocky planets, and which have also been surveyed by APOGEE.

Pecka! Dnes potvrzeno rovnou na AAS :)
Lowell Observatory to Renovate Pluto Discovery Telescope - Lowell Observatory
https://lowell.edu/pluto-telescope-renovation/

The instrument at Lowell Observatory used by Clyde Tombaugh to discover Pluto will soon undergo renovation. The year-long project,
set to begin on January 12, will include restoration of both the historic telescope and the wooden dome that houses it. While the
telescope will be removed from the dome during this work, the dome will be open from time to time for public tours as work allows.

...This spinning, supermassive black hole is producing a rotating, tightly-wound magnetic funnel. The powerful electromagnetic fields associated
with this structure have accelerated some of the inflowing gas away from the vicinity of the black hole in the form of an energetic, high-speed jet.
Then, these accelerated particles in the jet were accelerated again when they encountered the shock waves from the galaxy cluster collision.

Jets from the two other supermassive black holes (see labeled version of image) are likely having the same effect of accelerating particles before
they get a second boost from the shock waves. The jets from one of the black holes are too short to be seen in the labeled image.

This new image also shows three different supermassive
black holes in galaxies located in the merging clusters.

Eruption from a supermassive black hole's been swept up into
the collision between galaxy clusters Abell 3411 & 3412.

Chandra :: Photo Album :: Abell 3411 and 3412 :: January 5, 2017
http://chandra.si.edu/photo/2017/a3411/

Astronomers Discover Powerful Cosmic Double Whammy
Chandra Press Room :: Astronomers Discover Powerful Cosmic Double Whammy :: 5 January 17
http://chandra.si.edu/press/17_releases/press_010517.html

Astronomers have discovered a cosmic one-two punch unlike any ever seen before. Two of the most powerful phenomena in the Universe,
a supermassive black hole, and the collision of giant galaxy clusters, have combined to create a stupendous cosmic particle accelerator.

By combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India, the NSF's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array,
and other telescopes, researchers have found out what happens when matter ejected by a giant black hole is swept up in the merger of two enormous galaxy
clusters.

"We have seen each of these spectacular phenomena separately in many places," said Reinout van Weeren of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
(CfA) in Cambridge, Mass., who led the study that appears in the inaugural issue of the journal Nature Astronomy. "This is the first time, however, that
we seen them clearly linked together in the same system."

This cosmic double whammy is found in a pair of colliding galaxy clusters called Abell 3411 and Abell 3412 located about two billion light years from
Earth. The two clusters are both very massive, each weighing about a quadrillion — or a million billion — times the mass of the Sun.

The comet-shaped appearance of the X-rays detected by Chandra is produced by hot gas from one cluster plowing through the hot gas of the other cluster.
Optical data from the Keck Observatory and Japan's Subaru telescope, both on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, detected the galaxies in each cluster.

Reinout Van Weeren on "Astronomers Discover Powerful Cosmic Double Whammy", via Peter Edmonds.

Tak pokračujem... začala tiskovka rentgenové Chandry.

Chandra Deep Field South : Deepest X-ray Image Ever Reveals Black Hole Treasure Trove
Chandra :: Photo Album :: Chandra Deep Field South :: January 5, 2017
http://chandra.si.edu/photo/2017/cdfs/

This is the deepest X-ray image ever obtained, made with over 7 million seconds of observing time with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. These data give
astronomers the best look yet at the growth of black holes over billions of years beginning soon after the Big Bang, as described in our latest press release.

The image is from the Chandra Deep Field-South, or CDF-S. The full CDF-S field covers an approximately circular region on the sky with an area about two-thirds
that of the full Moon. However, the outer regions of the image, where the sensitivity to X-ray emission is lower, are not shown here. The colors in this image
represent different levels of X-ray energy detected by Chandra. Here the lowest-energy X-rays are red, the medium band is green, and the highest-energy X-rays
observed by Chandra are blue.

The central region of this image contains the highest concentration of supermassive black holes ever seen, equivalent to about 5,000 objects that would fit
into the area of the full Moon and about a billion over the entire sky. Researchers used the CDF-S data in combination with data from the Cosmic Assembly Near-
Infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), both including data from NASA's Hubble Space
Telescope to study galaxies and black holes between one and two billion years after the Big Bang.

NEBULA: Na tu Venuši jsem před pár dny taky čuměl z okna, svítila až neskutečně moc :)

Psyche: Journey to a Metal World
https://vimeo.com/194399729

A Mystery Space Object Will Cruise Past Earth Next Month | IFLScience
http://www.iflscience.com/space/a-mystery-space-object-will-cruise-past-earth-next-month/

The object, dubbed 2016 WF9, was spotted by NASA’s asteroid-and-comet-hunting NEOWISE project on November 27, 2016.
NEOWISE scientists believe that it could be as large as 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) wide. It’s expected to make its closest
approach to Earth’s orbit on February 25 at a distance of 51 million kilometers (32 million miles).

The object is causing a bit of confusion among NASA scientists, as they can’t tell if it’s a comet or an asteroid. As
a general (but by no means foolproof) rule, asteroids tend to be rocky or more metallic, while comets tend be icier.
This object appears to be dark and unreflective, which is typically an indication it is a comet. Despite that, it lacks
the characteristic dust and gas cloud that defines a comet. This lack of clarity also means the object has an unknown origin.

Astrophotographer Mike Killian took this image of Venus and the crescent moon on Dec. 2, 2016 from Toronto