Legendary radio telescope hangs in the balance : Nature News & Comment
http://www.nature.com/news/legendary-radio-telescope-hangs-in-the-balance-1.21268
US National Science Foundation looks to slash funding for Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory.

It is the radio telescope that hunts killer asteroids, probes distant cosmic blasts and decades ago sent Earth’s most powerful message to the stars.
Yet the storied Arecibo Observatory, an enormous aluminium dish nestled in a Puerto Rican sinkhole, might soon find itself out of the science game.

The US National Science Foundation (NSF), which owns the observatory, wants to offload the facility to free up money for newer ones. In the coming weeks,
it will ask for ideas about how Arecibo might be managed if the NSF reduces its current US$8.2-million annual contribution. By May, the agency plans to
release a final environmental-impact statement, a federally mandated analysis of the effects of various scenarios — from continuing to run Arecibo to
mothballing or even demolishing its iconic dish. Soon after that, the NSF will decide which path to take.

Arecibo advocates are not going to let the telescope die without a fight. On 4 January, they pressed their case at a meeting of the American Astronomical
Society in Grapevine, Texas — arguing that Arecibo is putting out some of the best science it has ever done, and that the NSF is moving too quickly to
divest itself of an astronomical treasure.


The US National Science Foundation is planning to divest itself of older telescopes to free up money for newer facilities.

NEBULA:
VIRGO: tak jsem si hodila do googlu stejnej vyhl.řetězec jako včera a ejhle zůstaly mi fialový odkazy, na který jsem klikala, takže super, tak jsem to projela a je teda už méně super, že jsem nic nenašla, tak vůbec nevím, kde jsem na to přišla, asi jsem už byla unavená a něco si špatně přeložila...moje chyba...takže nic, omlouvám se, beru zpět a mrzí mně, žes s tím ztrácel čas, spu si popel na hlavu

________________
no ale k něčemu tto bylo, našla jsem zajímavost, možná tu proběhla, možná ne:
Will asteroid 2012 TC4 hit Earth in October 2017?
https://phys.org/news/2015-04-asteroid-tc4-earth-october.html

Asteroid sleuths go back to the future / Space Situational Awareness / Operations / Our Activities / ESA
http://www.esa.int/.../Operations/Space_Situational_Awareness/Asteroid_sleuths_go_back_to_the_future
Careful sleuthing through decade-old images has enabled ESA’s asteroid team to decide
that a newly discovered space rock poses little threat of hitting Earth any time soon.

Vše nej!
Robert Woodrow Wilson: Tuning in to the Big Bang
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bnL_ztPo6s

Stardust makes up 97 per cent of our bodies
http://www.asianage.com/life/more-features/090117/stardust-makes-up-97-per-cent-of-our-bodies.html

The six most common elements of life on Earth - including more than 97 per cent of the mass of a human body - are carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen,
sulphur and phosphorus. It is an undeniable fact that most of the essential elements of life are made in stars, researchers said. "For the first time,
we can now study the distribution of elements across our Galaxy," said Sten Hasselquist of New Mexico State University in the US.

"The elements we measure include the atoms that make up 97 per cent of the mass of the human body," Hasselquist said. The new results come from a catalogue
of more than 150,000 stars; for each star, it includes the amount of each of almost two dozen chemical elements.The new catalogue includes all of the "CHNOPS
elements" - carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulphur - 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. Researchers used spectroscopy to make
measurements. Astronomers in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have made these observations using the APOGEE (Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution
Experiment) spectrograph on the 2.5 metre 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.

And along came a Neptune-sized planet | astrobites
https://astrobites.org/2017/01/09/and-along-came-a-neptune-sized-planet/

At the end of its extended 4 year campaign in space, Kepler scientists were left with a telescope that despite certain limitations, could still do good science.
Thus the K2 mission was born and has so far found an additional 520 candidate exoplanets, including K2:105 b: a “Hot-Neptune” orbiting around a Sun-like G2 star.
In this astrobite we will be discussing the K2 mission, confirming candidate planets using ground based telescopes and the importance of objects like K2-105 b
if we are ever going to understand our own Solar system.

Why stars seem brighter this time of year | Space | EarthSky
http://earthsky.org/space/star-seasonal-appearance-brightness
No matter where you are on Earth on December, January and February evenings,
you’re looking toward bright stars in our local spiral arm.

NEBULA: V noci jsem na space.com našel odkaz na Slooh, což jsou klasičtí sledovači
takových událostí/průletů, ale na jejich stránkách už jsem si ničeho nevšimnul.

VIRGO: no právě jsem neuvedla zdroj, protože jsem o tom asteroidu taky četla kdevšude a už jsem nevěděla, kde tohle bylo (možná space.com?) nicméně mi to vrtalo hlavou, proto ten dotaz, i na YT jsem zkoukla dvě videa přímo o tomto asteroidu....tak nevím třeba je to mnoho povyku pro nic, a někdo jen chtěl zvednout mediální zájem, takže mně chytil ;)
Omlouvám se tedy za takový příspěvek....
Když tak taky ještě večer kouknu, jestli se objeví nějaký konkrétnější info, proč by teď mělo být víc asteroidů...ale spíš jsem se teda chytla nějaký nesmyslný věty a měla bych používat lepší zdroje ;)

Where Are the Stars? See How Light Pollution Affects Night Skies | Short Film Showcase
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FXJUP6_O1w

‘Alien megastructure’ signal may be due to star eating a planet | New Scientist
https://www.newscientist.com/...17459-alien-megastructure-signal-may-be-due-to-star-eating-a-planet/

Orbiting debris could be making Tabby’s star blink

When you are a messy eater, it can take a long time to clean up after a meal. The slow dimming of Tabby’s star and the sudden
dips in its light may be caused by an orbiting cloud of debris left over from when it partially gobbled a planet.

The star KIC 8462852 rose to prominence in 2015, when a team of astronomers led by Yale’s Tabetha Boyajian (after whom the star
is nicknamed) observed a series of abrupt dips in its brightness, in which it dimmed by up to 22 per cent before going back to normal.

There are many ideas about what causes the star’s sporadic blinking, from internal stellar dynamics to swarms of orbiting comets to
an enormous alien megastructure.

Things got more complicated in January 2016, when a review of old photographic plates revealed that Tabby’s star dimmed by 14 per cent
between 1890 and 1989. It faded by another 3 per cent over the four years it was observed by the Kepler space observatory.

Now Brian Metzger at Columbia University in New York and his colleagues have a theory that could explain both the brief dips in light
and the gradual dimming. The group thinks Tabby’s star is just returning to its natural state – after a large, messy meal.

Searching for the Ruins of Alien Civilisations | Well-Bred Insolence
https://wellbredinsolence.wordpress.com/2017/01/09/searching-for-the-ruins-of-alien-civilisations/

How a moon slows the decay of Pluto's atmosphere
http://phys.org/news/2017-01-moon-pluto-atmosphere.html

Pluto's relationship with its moon Charon is one of the more unusual interactions in the solar system due to Charon's size and proximity.
It's more than half of Pluto's diameter and orbits only 12,000 or so miles away. To put that into perspective, picture our moon three times
closer to Earth, and as large as Mars.

A new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology provides additional insight into this relationship and how it affects the continuous
stripping of Pluto's atmosphere by solar wind. When Charon is positioned between the sun and Pluto, the research indicates that the moon
can significantly reduce atmospheric loss.

"Charon doesn't always have its own atmosphere," said Carol Paty, a Georgia Tech associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric
Sciences. "But when it does, it creates a shield for Pluto and redirects much of the solar wind around and away."

This barrier creates a more acute angle of Pluto's bow shock, slowing down the deterioration of the atmosphere. When Charon doesn't have an
atmosphere, or when it's behind or next to Pluto (a term scientists call "downstream"), then Charon has only a minor effect on the interaction
of the solar wind with Pluto.

The study's predictions, performed before the New Horizons probe collected and returned data to Earth, is consistent with the measurements made
by the spacecraft about Pluto's atmospheric loss rate. Previous estimates at the time of the study were at least 100 times higher than the actual
rate. The research is currently published in a special Pluto issue of the journal Icarus.

NEBULA: Za poslední dny dva decentní z Ruska:

Bright fireball spotted over Russia, north of Moscow, on January 3, 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuMCja-mRvI

Very bright fireball spotted over the Archangelsk Region in northern Russia on January 8, 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8Pzp5Mpjwo

VIRGO:
Skutečně úžasná ukázka, jak můžou peníze multimiriardáře pomoct astronomii,
a ta zas pomůže jemu. To je fakt jak z nějakýho snu. Jurij Milner je třída.

VLT Imager and Spectrometer for mid-Infrared
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIfu6ZPEfXs