How Old Observations Are Building Hubble's Legacy - Scientific American
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-old-observations-are-building-hubbles-legacy/
Data from the space telescope will yield discoveries long after the instrument is kaput

NASA Studying Shared Venus Science Objectives with Russian Space Research Institute
https://www.nasa.gov/...udying-shared-venus-science-objectives-with-russian-space-research-institute

A team of NASA-sponsored scientists will meet with the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Space Research Institute (IKI) next week to continue work
on a Joint Science Definition Team study focused on identifying shared science objectives for Venus exploration. The visit comes after a report
was recently delivered to both NASA Headquarters in Washington and IKI in Moscow, assessing and refining the science objectives of the IKI
Venera-D (Venera-Dolgozhivuschaya) Mission to Venus, Earth’s closest planetary neighbor.

The IKI Venera-D mission concept as it stands today would include a Venus orbiter that would operate for up to three years, and a lander designed
to survive the incredibly harsh conditions a spacecraft would encounter on Venus’ surface for a few hours. The science definition team is also
assessing the potential of flying a solar-powered airship in Venus’ upper atmosphere. The independent flying vehicle could be released from
the Venera-D lander, enter the atmosphere, and independently explore Venus’ atmosphere for up to three months.

Skvělý článek!
Hubble trouble | Science
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6329/1010.full
How a recharged debate over the expansion of the universe could lead to new physics.

Why the discovery of a bevy of quasars will boost efforts to understand galaxies' origins
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-discovery-bevy-quasars-boost-efforts.html

Late last year, an international team including researchers from the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA)
at Peking University announced the discovery of more than 60 extremely distant quasars, nearly doubling the number known to
science - and thus providing dozens of new opportunities to look deep into our universe's history.

Now, in a roundtable discussion hosted by The Kavli Foundation, three astrophysicists, including a member of the team that
made the discovery, explain why this important finding will help unravel the secrets of our modern universe's origins, as well
as the mysterious connection between galaxies and monstrous black holes.

Quasars are the stupendously bright regions in the cores of galaxies, powered by gargantuan black holes.

"You can think of quasars as lighthouses in the dark of the early universe," said Roberto Maiolino, a professor of experimental
astrophysics at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge and director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology,
Cambridge (KICC). "Just as a lighthouse's beam might shine on nearby land forms, making them visible from far away, quasars
enable us to investigate the very distant universe and understand the physics of primordial galaxies."

Ultra-distant quasars offer a unique window into how both galaxies and supermassive black holes developed and interacted.
But they are rare, so finding them requires extensive observing surveys using powerful, large telescopes that take images
across a large part of the sky.

Mechanism Underlying Size-Sorting of Rubble on Asteroid Itokawa Revealed | Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University OIST
https://www.oist.jp/...s-releases/mechanism-underlying-size-sorting-rubble-asteroid-itokawa-revealed

Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), Japan, in collaboration with researchers at Rutgers University,
USA, have used a combination of experiments, simulations and analyses to propose a mechanism underlying the lateral size-sorting of particles on Itokawa:
small pebbles hitting the surface of Itokawa rebound from boulders but sink into pebble-rich regions.

The First Known Depiction of the Cosmos Adorns a 3,600-Year-Old Disk
http://hyperallergic.com/361145/nebra-sky-disk/
Discovered in 1999 in Germany, the 3,600-year-old Nebra Sky Disk
is recognized as the oldest known depiction of cosmic phenomena.

Could Fast Radio Bursts Be Powering Alien Probes?2017-09 | www.cfa.harvard.edu/
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2017-09

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has looked for many different signs of alien life, from radio broadcasts to laser flashes,
without success. However, newly published research suggests that mysterious phenomena called fast radio bursts could be evidence of advanced
alien technology. Specifically, these bursts might be leakage from planet-sized transmitters powering interstellar probes in distant galaxies.

"Fast radio bursts are exceedingly bright given their short duration and origin at great distances, and we haven't identified a possible natural
source with any confidence," said theorist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "An artificial origin is worth contemplating
and checking."

As the name implies, fast radio bursts are millisecond-long flashes of radio emission. First discovered in 2007, fewer than two dozen have been
detected by gigantic radio telescopes like the Parkes Observatory in Australia or the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. They are inferred to
originate from distant galaxies, billions of light-years away.

Loeb and his co-author Manasvi Lingam (Harvard University) examined the feasibility of creating a radio transmitter strong enough for it to be
detectable across such immense distances. They found that, if the transmitter were solar powered, the sunlight falling on an area of a planet twice
the size of the Earth would be enough to generate the needed energy. Such a vast construction project is well beyond our technology, but within
the realm of possibility according to the laws of physics.

Lingam and Loeb also considered whether such a transmitter would be viable from an engineering perspective, or whether the tremendous energies
involved would melt any underlying structure. Again, they found that a water-cooled device twice the size of Earth could withstand the heat.

Baby Galaxies Blowing Bubbles | astrobites
https://astrobites.org/2017/03/07/baby-galaxies-blowing-bubbles/

About four hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, the universe settled into a pretty dull period in its history. There were no stars or galaxies,
just one massive expanse of neutral hydrogen, sitting in the dark. This period in the universe’s history, known appropriately as the Dark Ages, came
abruptly to an end when the first stars were born and began to shine, dumping loads of high energy photons into their surroundings. These photons created
‘bubbles’ of ionised hydrogen around the stars, which slowly grew as more photons were pumped out by the stars. The bubbles surrounding the first stars
were pretty small, but later, as stars began to group together into the first galaxies, these bubbles were blown much bigger by the combined photons from
all the stars in the galaxy. Over time the bubbles from neighbouring galaxies began to overlap, until eventually all of the hydrogen in the universe was
ionised (see Figure 1). This process is known as reionisation (Astrobites has written plenty about reionisation in the past – for more background,
go check out some of these articles), and it’s a key period in the universe’s history.

[1703.02056] Transiting Planets with LSST III: Detection Rate per Year of Operation
https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.02056

Studying Magnetic Space Explosions with NASA Missions
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/studying-magnetic-space-explosions-with-nasa-missions

Every day, invisible magnetic explosions are happening around Earth, on the surface of the sun and across the universe. These explosions,
known as magnetic reconnection, occur when magnetic field lines cross, releasing stored magnetic energy. Such explosions are a key way that
clouds of charged particles — plasmas — are accelerated throughout the universe. In Earth’s magnetosphere — the giant magnetic bubble
surrounding our planet — these magnetic reconnections can fling charged particles toward Earth, triggering auroras.