ALMA: The World's Highest Observatory - Simple Discoveries
http://simplediscoveries.com/alma-worlds-highest-observatory/

Cryovolcanism on dwarf planet Ceres
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-cryovolcanism-dwarf-planet-ceres.html

Among the most striking features on the surface of Ceres are the bright spots in the center of Occator crater which stood out already
as NASA's space probe Dawn approached the dwarf planet. Scientists under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System
Research (MPS) have now for the first time determined the age of this bright material, which consists mainly of deposits of special
mineral salts. With about four million years only, these deposits are about 30 million years younger than the crater itself. This, as
well as the distribution and nature of the bright material within the crater, suggests that Occator crater has been the scene of
eruptive outbursts of subsurface brine over a long period and until almost recently. Ceres is thus the body closest to the Sun
that shows cryovolcanic activity.

On this day in 1973: Comet Kohoutek, formally designated C/1973 E1, 1973 XII, and 1973f, was first sighted on March 7, 1973 by
Czech astronomer Luboš Kohoutek. (M. J. Hendrie, gives the "discovery" as March 18, while observing plates taken on March 7th and 9th.)
IAU Minor Planet Center
http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?object_id=C/1973%20E1



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Gennady Borisov has discovered a new long period comet! Comet C/2017 E1 (Borisov)
IAU Minor Planet Center
http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?object_id=C/2017%20E1

CBET nr. 4369, issued on 2017, March 04, announces the discovery of a comet (magnitude ~17) by Gennadii Vladimirovich Borisov
on three unfiltered 120-s exposures obtained on Mar. 1.10 UT with a 0.4-m f/2.3 astrograph at the "Mobil Astronomical Robotics
Genon" Observatory (MARGO) near Nauchnij. The new comet has been designated C/2017 E1 (Borisov).

I performed follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp. Stacking of 20 unfiltered exposures, 30 seconds each,
obtained remotely on 2017, March 1.5 from H06 (iTelescope network) through a 0.43-m f/6.8 reflector + CCD + f/4.5 focal reducer, shows
that this object is a comet with a diffuse coma nearly 30 arcsec in diameter.

Remanzacco Observatory - Comets & Neo: New Comet: C/2017 E1 (Borisov)
http://remanzacco.blogspot.cz/2017/03/new-comet-c2017-e1-borisov.html

https://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/45084
Researchers at UC Riverside and Caltech team up on Astrophysical Journal paper

The scaffolding that holds the large-scale structure of the universe constitutes galaxies, dark matter and gas (from which stars are forming),
organized in complex networks known as the cosmic web. This network comprises dense regions known as galaxy clusters and groups that are woven
together through thread-like structures known as filaments. These filaments form the backbone of the cosmic web and host a large fraction of
the mass in the universe, as well as sites of star formation activity.

While there is ample evidence that environments shape and direct the evolution of galaxies, it is not clear how galaxies behave in the larger,
global cosmic web and in particular in the more extended environment of filaments. In a joint collaboration between the California Institute of
Technology and the University of California, Riverside, astronomers have performed an extensive study of the properties of galaxies within
filaments formed at different times during the age of the universe.

In a just-published paper, astronomers used a sample of 40,000 galaxies in the COSMOS field, a large and contiguous patch of sky with deep enough
data to look at galaxies very far away, and with accurate distance measurements to individual galaxies. The large area covered by COSMOS allowed
sampling volumes of different densities within the cosmic web.

Using techniques developed to identify the large-scale structures, they cataloged the cosmic web to its components: clusters, filaments, and
sparse regions devoid of any object, extending into the universe as it was 8 billion years ago. The galaxies were then divided into those that
are central to their local environment (the center of gravity) and those that roam around in their host environments (satellites).

“What makes this study unique is the observation of thousands of galaxies in different filaments spanning a significant fraction of the age of
the Universe” said Behnam Darvish a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who is the lead author on the paper. “When we consider the distant universe,
we look back in time to when the cosmic web and filaments were younger and had not yet fully evolved and therefore, could study the joint evolution
of the large scale structures and galaxies associated with them.”

Model shows ejection of gasses around black holes due to magnetism
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-ejection-gasses-black-holes-due.html

An international team of researchers has created a model to explain the force that causes gases to be blown away from a black hole
and have found the force to be magnetism. In their paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the team describes the factors
that went into their model and the degree of confidence they have in it.

Scientists have suspected that magnetic fields were responsible for pushing gases away from a black hole since the 1970s, but there was not a consensus—others suggested it
might have been due to the heat of the gas. In this new effort, the researchers built on a prior model that had found magnetism to be the force pushing gas away from a giant
black hole—this time, they based their model on small black holes and found the same result. This, the team suggests, means that it is likely the case for all black holes.

The gases in question come from a companion star—the black hole strips the star's gas and as it does so, creates a spiral with an accretion disk. As the spiral turns, an
electric current is generated in the accretion disk, which forms a vortex pulling in more and more matter. But, the model showed, some of the magnetism serves to push gas
from the outer edges of the spiral out into space, where it escapes and can be observed by X-ray telescopes on Earth.

Earth is bombarded at random | ETH Zurich
https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2017/03/earth-is-bombarded-at-random.html

Asteroids don’t hit our planet at regular intervals, as was previously thought. Earth scientists from ETH Zurich and Lund University in Sweden
have reached this conclusion after analysing impact craters formed in the last 500 million years, concentrating on precisely dated events.

Do mass extinctions, like the fall of the dinosaurs, and the formation of large impact craters on Earth occur together at regular intervals?
“This question has been under discussion for more than thirty years now,” says Matthias Meier from ETH Zurich’s Institute of Geochemistry and
Petrology. As late as 2015, US researchers indicated that impact craters were formed on Earth around every 26 million years. “We have determined,
however, that asteroids don’t hit the Earth at periodic intervals,” says Meier, refuting the popular hypothesis.

In the past, researchers have even postulated the existence of a companion star to the Sun. This supposed dim dwarf star, named Nemesis after
the Greek goddess of revenge, was believed to draw near to the Sun every 26 million years and cause asteroids to bombard Earth. This would
next occur in around 10 million years. Nemesis, however, has never been found.

How we're already seeking life on TRAPPIST-1's rocky planets | New Scientist
https://www.newscientist.com/...31155-100-how-were-already-seeking-life-on-trappist1s-rocky-planets/

WE ARE already taking the first steps toward learning if there could be life on TRAPPIST-1’s newly discovered planets – and what that life might look like.

Last week, a team led by Michaël Gillon at Belgium’s University of Liege announced that TRAPPIST-1, a small, faint star some 40 light years away, has four
more rocky planets to join the three we already knew about.

All are less than 20 per cent bigger than Earth, and all orbit well within the distance at which Mercury circles our sun. Despite this closeness, the planets
may be candidates to search for life. That’s because TRAPPIST-1 is much smaller and dimmer than the sun, so three of the planets may be cool enough to host
liquid water on the surface, putting them in the habitable zone.

VIRGO: ...ovšem začít se musí tím, že se Marsu pořídí magnetosféra:
NASA proposes a magnetic shield to protect Mars' atmosphere
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html

Astronomický ústav AV ČR - Novinky
http://www.asu.cas.cz/...s/1184/19/evropska-jizni-observator-si-v-praze-pripomene-10-let-clenstvi-cr

Ve dnech 7. - 8. března 2017 zasedne v Praze Rada Evropské jižní observatoře (ESO Council). Tento vrcholný orgán ESO
zasedá čtyřikrát ročně a jeho pražské zasedání se koná při příležitosti 10 let členství České republiky v ESO. Evropská
jižní observatoř provozuje nejvýkonnější astronomické přístroje na světě a čeští astronomové se na tom podílejí.

Archaea: The 'Dark Matter' of the Microbial World - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/archaea-sequencing-challenges/518535/

The three domains that make up all life on Earth are bacteria, archaea, and complex life (which includes us humans). And a new study of gut microbiomes finds
that a common DNA sequencing technique overlooks 90 percent of the diversity in archaea—the single-celled organisms that comprise the oft-forgotten third domain.
Archaea and bacteria are both microbes—microscopic and single-celled —but do not make the mistake, as scientists once did, of thinking they are basically alike.

Archaea are at once alien and intimately familiar. Many of the most well-known ones are extremophiles, which live in harsh environments like hot springs. Yet,
archaea may be evolutionarily more closely related to us—multicellular humans—than bacteria. “When I tell people I work on archaea, most people don’t even know
what it is,” said Kasie Raymann, a microbiologist at the University of Texas at Austin and an author of the study.

JWST is back at Goddard´s cleanrooms

Introducing the New CNEOS Website
Center for NEO Studies
http://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/
he Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) has created the CNEOS website at http://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov
to replace the legacy Near-Earth Object Program website at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov. The CNEOS website provides the same near-Earth object
(NEO) data as on the legacy site, in a modern, interactive framework, and it incorporates new content as well. High-quality NEO orbital
elements, summaries of close approaches, the Sentry impact risk table, NEO discovery statistics, and data on asteroids that might be
accessible for exploration are all presented in interactive tables and plots.

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).