Study crashes main Moon-formation theory
http://phys.org/news/2017-01-main-moon-formation-theory.html

Such a bombardment birth would explain a major inconsistency in the prevailing hypothesis that the Moon splintered off in a single, giant impact
between Earth and a Mars-sized celestial body. In such a scenario, scientists expect that about a fifth of the Moon's material would have come from
Earth and the rest from the impacting body. Yet, the makeup of the Earth and the Moon are near identical—an improbability that has long perplexed
backers of the single-impact hypothesis."The multiple impact scenario is a more 'natural' way of explaining the formation of the Moon," said Raluca
Rufu of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, who co-authored the new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Outflowing Gas in Ultraluminous Galaxiessu201701 | www.cfa.harvard.edu/
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/su201701

Galaxies evolve over billions of years in part through the activity of star formation and their supermassive nuclear black holes,
and also by mergers with other galaxies. Some features of galaxies, in particular the strong correlations found between the mass
of the central black hole and properties like galaxy velocity structure or luminosity, imply a fundamental connection between
the growth of the nuclear black hole and the assembly of stars on a global scale. Feedback of some kind is therefore expected to
explain these tight correlations, and astronomers have been working to identify and study it. One prominent suggestion for feedback
is the presence of warm outflowing gas, powered by new stars but which would deplete the galaxy of the raw material needed for
making new stars, and/or for enhancing the black hole mass.

A montage of Hand-Lens images of Curiosity's weather 'Booms' located on the mast. These are part of the Rover Environmental Monitoring
Station (REMS) and are being checked out as part of an investigation to a malfunction of one of the wind speed indicators.

A new CERN experiment targets even higher energies (eventually) | Science | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/.../jan/08/a-new-cern-experiment-targets-even-higher-energies-eventually

The AWAKE experiment at CERN made a breakthrough at the end of last year. A long-term technology-development project, its aim is
to drag electrons through a plasma, behind a beam of protons, and provide a route to higher energies than the Large Hadron Collider

Start Rolling Your Blunts: Spherical Planetarium Videos Are Here | Motherboard
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/spherical-planetarium-videos

The Aquarius simulation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NIr2zYtHRQ

V pondělí před půl osmou večer: SpaxeX znovu a lépe!
SpaceX set to launch again Monday
http://phys.org/news/2017-01-spacex-monday.html

Scientists close in on the true mass of the Milky Way by calculating what they know, what they partially know and what is still uncertain | McMaster Daily News
http://dailynews.mcmaster.ca/...what-they-know-what-they-partially-know-and-what-is-still-uncertain/

It’s a problem of galactic complexity, but researchers are getting closer to accurately measuring the mass of the Milky Way Galaxy.

In the latest of a series of papers that could have broader implications for the field of astronomy, McMaster astrophysicist Gwendolyn Eadie,
working with her PhD supervisor William Harris and with a Queen’s University statistician, Aaron Springford, has refined Eadie and Harris’s
own method for measuring the mass of the galaxy that is home to our solar system.

The short answer, using the refined method, is between 4.0 X 10^11 and 5.8 X 10^11 solar masses. In simpler terms, that’s about the mass of our Sun,
multiplied by 400 to 580 billion. The Sun, for the record, has a mass of two nonillion (that’s 2 followed by 30 zeroes) kilograms, or 330 000 times
the mass of Earth. This Galactic mass estimate includes matter out to 125 kiloparsecs from the center of the Galaxy (125 kiloparsecs is almost
4 X 10^18 kilometers). When the mass estimate is extended out to 300kpc, the mass is approximately 9 X 10^11 solar masses.

Measuring the mass of our home galaxy, or any galaxy, is particularly difficult. A galaxy includes not just stars, planets, moons, gases, dust and
other objects and material, but also a big helping of dark matter, a mysterious and invisible form of matter that is not yet fully understood and
has not been directly detected in the lab. Astronomers and cosmologists, however, can infer the presence of dark matter through its gravitational
influence on visible objects.

News | Black Holes Hide in Our Cosmic Backyard
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2017-005

Monster black holes sometimes lurk behind gas and dust, hiding from the gaze of most telescopes. But they give themselves away when material
they feed on emits high-energy X-rays that NASA's NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) mission can detect. That's how NuSTAR recently
identified two gas-enshrouded supermassive black holes, located at the centers of nearby galaxies.

"These black holes are relatively close to the Milky Way, but they have remained hidden from us until now," said Ady Annuar, a graduate student
at Durham University in the United Kingdom, who presented the results at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Grapevine, Texas. "They're
like monsters hiding under your bed."

Both of these black holes are the central engines of what astronomers call "active galactic nuclei," a class of extremely bright objects that
includes quasars and blazars. Depending on how these galactic nuclei are oriented and what sort of material surrounds them, they appear very
different when examined with telescopes.

Hubble Space Telescope - News
http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2017-03

Eerie mysteries in the universe can be betrayed by simple shadows. The wonder of a solar eclipse is produced by the moon's shadow,
and over 1,000 planets around other stars have been cataloged by the shadow they cast when passing in front of their parent star.
Astronomers were surprised to see a huge shadow sweeping across a disk of dust and gas encircling a nearby, young star. They have
a bird's-eye view of the disk, because it is tilted face-on to Earth, and the shadow sweeps around the disk like the hands moving
around a clock. But, unlike the hands of a clock, the shadow takes 16 years to make one rotation.

Hubble has 18 years' worth of observations of the star, called TW Hydrae. Therefore, astronomers could assemble a time-lapse movie
of the shadow's rotation. Explaining it is another story. Astronomers think that an unseen planet in the disk is doing some heavy
lifting by gravitationally pulling on material near the star and warping the inner part of the disk. The twisted, misaligned inner
disk is casting its shadow across the surface of the outer disk. TW Hydrae resides 192 light-years away and is roughly 8 million
years old.