Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias - IAC - Educational Outreach
http://www.iac.es/divulgacion.php?op1=16&id=1167&lang=en
A new study suggests that the gravitational waves detected by the LIGO experiment must have come
from black holes generated during the collapse of stars, and not in the earliest phases of the Universe.

Researchers investigate chemical composition of globular cluster NGC 6362
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-chemical-composition-globular-cluster-ngc.html

European astronomers have recently studied the chemical composition of the low-mass globular cluster designated NGC 6362.
Their detailed analysis of chemical abundances for 17 elements in the cluster provides important insights into the nature
of NGC 6362. The findings were presented March 1 in a paper published online on arXiv.org.

Located about 25,000 light years away in the constellation Ara, NGC 6362 is a an irregularly shaped globular cluster. With
a mass of approximately 53,000 solar masses, it is one of the least massive globulars where multiple populations of stars
have been detected. The cluster is about 13.5 billion years old.

Although NGC 6362 is well known to astronomers, its detailed chemical composition has not been studied so far. So a team of
researchers led by Davide Massari of the Leiden Observatory in Netherlands investigated chemical abundances of this cluster.
For their study, they used the FLAMES and UVES high-resolution spectrographs mounted on the Very Large Telescope in Chile.

Karoo’s HERA radio telescope attracts even more international funding – SKA SA
http://www.ska.ac.za/...leases/karoos-hera-radio-telescope-attracts-even-more-international-funding/

The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) radio telescope, located only a few kilometres from the MeerKAT radio telescope, was awarded
a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in the US to the value of $5.8 million, equivalent to approximately R75 million.

The construction of HERA started in 2015 and already 35 of the 14-metre diameter dishes have been erected. In September 2016, the National Science Foundation
(NSF) invested $9.5 million (equivalent to approximately R124 million) in the project and HERA was granted the status of a Square Kilometre Array (SKA) precursor
telescope. The NSF funding allowed the array to expand to 240 radio dishes by 2018. This additional funding injection from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
will allow HERA to expand even further to 350 dishes.

This innovative radio telescope will be instrumental in detecting the distinctive signature that would allow astronomers to understand the formation and evolution
of the very first luminous sources: the first stars and galaxies in the Universe – a period the scientists call the Epoch of Reionization (EoR).

Star clusters discovery could upset the astronomical applecart
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-star-clusters-discovery-astronomical-applecart.html

The discovery of young stars in old star clusters could send scientists back to the drawing board for one of the Universe's most common objects.

Dr Bi-Qing For, from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Perth, said our understanding of how stars evolve is a cornerstone of astronomical science.

"There are a billion trillion stars in the Universe and we've been observing and classifying those we can see for more than a century," she said.
"Our models of stellar evolution are based on the assumption that stars within star clusters formed from the same material at roughly the same time."

Gravity Wave Detection with Atomic Clockssu201709 | www.cfa.harvard.edu/
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/su201709

The recent detection of gravitation waves (GW) from the merger of two black holes of about thirty solar-masses each with the ground-based LIGO facility
has generated renewed enthusiasm for developing even more sensitive measurement techniques. Ground-based GW instruments have widely spaced sensors
that can detect sub-microscopic changes in their separation -- better than one part in a billion trillion, They suffer, however, from the noise produced by
small ground tremors -- vibrations from natural or man-made sources that ripple through the precisely tuned detectors. The vibrations most difficult to
compensate for are those that change relatively slowly, at frequencies around once a second or less, yet astronomers predict that GW sources producing
these slow variations should be interesting and abundant, from compact stellar-mass binary stars to gravitational events in the early universe.

Synthetic biology to help colonize Mars
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-synthetic-biology-colonize-mars.html

Shannon Dangle finished her PhD ready to take on a new challenge and set her sights on research to help make Mars colonization possible.
But she isn't pursuing research on rocket fuels or space suits. She's using synthetic biology to improve biomanufacturing of needed resources
using simple inputs like sunlight, water, and CO2.

Hmm, zřejmě vzniká přímá úměra mezi vzrůstajícím počtem objevených exoplanet a pomateností jinak vcelku seriózních pozemšťanů... :DD

Whole New Worlds: An Aladdin History of Exoplanets | A Capella Science, Trudbol, SamRobson, Gia Mora
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gai8dMA19Sw

Exoplanets, 4 billion-year-old life, Fermi’s paradox and zero-one laws « Math Scholar
http://experimentalmath.org/.../exoplanets-4-billion-year-old-life-fermis-paradox-and-zero-one-laws/
What do exoplanets, four-billion-year-old life, Fermi’s paradox and zero-one laws of probability
theory have to do with each other? Quite a bit, actually. Let us review these developments, one by one

Scientists believe they have found fossils dating back at least 3.8bn years – and they might even help us find life on other planets
Do the Quebec fossils prove that life begin much earlier than we thought? | Science | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/...the-quebec-fossils-prove-that-life-begin-much-earlier-than-we-thought

8 things we know about Proxima b | Supernova Condensate
https://supernovacondensate.net/2017/03/03/8-things-we-know-about-proxima-b/

An excerpt from the Coursera class Science of the Solar System by Mike Brown.
The class is free and online runs once every three months.

Planet Nine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-ktWBtt7sc