ASTRONOMERS FIND ORBIT OF MARS HOSTS REMAINS OF ANCIENT MINI-PLANETS
Armagh Observatory
http://star.arm.ac.uk/press/2017/mars_trojans_pr.html

Armagh Observatory and Planetarium, 31st March 2017: The planet Mars shares its orbit with a handful of small asteroids, the so-called Trojans.
Now an international team of astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile have found that most of these objects share a common composition;
they are likely the remains of a mini-planet that was destroyed by a collision long ago. The findings are reported in a paper to appear in Monthly
Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in April.

Trojan asteroids move in orbits with the same average distance from the Sun as a planet, trapped within gravitational "safe havens" 60 degrees in
front of and behind the planet. The special significance of these locations was worked out by 18th century French Mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange.
In his honour, they are now known as "Lagrange points"; the point leading the planet is L4; that trailing the planet is L5.

Mysterious bursts do come from outer space | 3 Apr 2017 | Swinburne news
http://www.swinburne.edu.au/...news/2017/04/mysterious-bursts-of-energy-do-come-from-outer-space.php

Fast Radio Bursts present one of modern astronomy’s greatest mysteries: what or who in the Universe is transmitting short bursts of radio energy across the cosmos?

Manisha Caleb, a PhD candidate at Australian National University, Swinburne University of Technology and the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics
(CAASTRO), has confirmed that the mystery bursts of radio waves that astronomers have hunted for ten years really do come from outer space.

Ms Caleb worked with Swinburne and University of Sydney colleagues to detect three of these Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) with the Molonglo radio telescope 40 km from Canberra.

Discovered almost 10 years ago at CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope, Fast Radio Bursts are millisecond-duration intense pulses of radio light that appear to be coming from
vast distances. They are about a billion times more luminous than anything we have ever seen in our own Milky Way galaxy.

One potential explanation of the mystery is that they weren’t really coming from outer space, but were some form of local interference tricking astronomers into searching
for new theories of their ‘impossible’ radio energy.

“Perhaps the most bizarre explanation for the FRBs is that they were alien transmissions,” says ARC Laureate Fellow Professor Matthew Bailes from Swinburne.

New slowly evolving Type Ibn supernova discovered
https://phys.org/news/2017-04-slowly-evolving-ibn-supernova.html

An international team of astronomers has detected a new slowly evolving Type Ibn supernova as part of the Optical Gravitational
Lensing Experiment (OGLE). The new event, designated OGLE-2014-SN-13, has the longest rise time ever observed in Type Ibn supernovae.
The discovery is described in a paper published Mar. 23 on the arXiv pre-print server.

Dark matter may explain the very nature of how galaxies form | WIRED UK
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/hunt-dark-matter

The search for the dark matter particle has consistently drawn up blanks, but now physicists are edging closer

Myslel jsem si, že nový G+ irituje jen mě (protože se neúčastním uživatelských debat),
ale teď vidím, že nejsem sám. Vypadá to, jako kdyby to provozovatele už tak prudilo,
že děljí vše proto, aby lidi odtáhli jinam...

Black Hole Gets Kicked Around by Gravitational Waves Pt.2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmKgUtBj-Cw

https://www.nasa.gov/...ure/goddard/2017/wispy-remains-of-supernova-explosion-hide-possible-survivor

Of all the varieties of exploding stars, the ones called Type Ia are perhaps the most intriguing. Their predictable brightness lets astronomers
measure the expansion of the universe, which led to the discovery of dark energy. Yet the cause of these supernovae remains a mystery. Do they
happen when two white dwarf stars collide? Or does a single white dwarf gorge on gases stolen from a companion star until bursting?

If the second theory is true, the normal star should survive. Astronomers used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to search the gauzy remains of
a Type Ia supernova in a neighboring galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. They found a sun-like star that showed signs of being associated
with the supernova. Further investigations will be needed to learn if this star is truly the culprit behind a white dwarf's fiery demise.

This image, taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows the supernova remnant SNR 0509-68.7, also known as N103B. It is located 160,000
light-years from Earth in a neighboring galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. N103B resulted from a Type Ia supernova, whose cause remains
a mystery. One possibility would leave behind a stellar survivor, and astronomers have identified a possible candidate.

The actual supernova remnant is the irregular shaped dust cloud, at the upper center of the image. The gas in the lower half of the image and
the dense concentration of stars in the lower left are the outskirts of the star cluster NGC 1850.

The Hubble image combines visible and near-infrared light taken by the Wide Field Camera 3 in June 2014.

SNR 0509-68.7
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOXzSx-M6Vs

Speeding star gives new clues to breakup of multi-star system
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-star-clues-breakup-multi-star.html

A remarkable new discovery using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals three stars that now hold the record as the youngest-known examples
of a super-fast-flying breed. "Until these observations, only a few—but older—examples of such rapidly-moving stars had been found with origins
traceable back to the volatile systems that likely ejected them," said lead researcher Kevin Luhman of Penn State University. "The new Hubble
observations provide very strong evidence that these three stars were ejected from an unstable multi-star system." The new discovery is
published in this month's Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Mysterious cosmic explosion surprises astronomers studying the distant X-ray universe
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-mysterious-cosmic-explosion-astronomers-distant.html

Scientists have discovered a mysterious flash of X-rays using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, in the deepest X-ray image ever
obtained. The X-ray source is located in a region of the sky known as the Chandra Deep Field-South. Over the 17 years Chandra has
been operating, the telescope has observed this field many times, resulting in an exposure time equivalent to 7 million seconds.

A Tour of CDF-S Transient XT1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YyGndzA_O0

YaleNews | Finding a ‘lost’ planet, about the size of Neptune
http://news.yale.edu/2017/03/29/finding-lost-planet-about-size-neptune

Yale astronomers have discovered a “lost” planet that is nearly the size of Neptune and tucked away in a solar system 3,000 light years from Earth.

The new planet, Kepler-150 f, was overlooked for several years. Computer algorithms identify most such “exoplanets,” which are planets located outside our
solar system. The algorithms search through data from space mission surveys, looking for the telltale transits of planets orbiting in front of distant stars.

But sometimes the computers miss something. In this case, it was a planet in the Kepler-150 system with a long orbit around its sun. Kepler-150 f takes 637
days to circle its sun, one of the longest orbits for any known system with five or more planets. The Kepler Mission found four other planets in the Kepler-150
system — Kepler-150 b, c, d, and e — several years ago. All of them have orbits much closer to their sun than the new planet does.

Inventing Tools for Detecting Life Elsewhere | Caltech
http://www.caltech.edu/news/inventing-tools-detecting-life-elsewhere-54515
Caltech astronomers develop new strategy for future telescopes

Recently, astronomers announced the discovery that a star called TRAPPIST-1 is orbited by seven Earth-size planets.
Three of the planets reside in the "habitable zone," the region around a star where liquid water is most likely to
exist on the surface of a rocky planet. Other potentially habitable worlds have also been discovered in recent years,
leaving many people wondering: How do we find out if these planets actually host life?

At Caltech, in the Exoplanet Technology Laboratory, or ET Lab, of Associate Professor of Astronomy Dimitri Mawet,
researchers have been busy developing a new strategy for scanning exoplanets for biosignatures—signs of life such
as oxygen molecules and methane. These chemicals—which don't naturally stick around for long because they bind with
other chemicals—are abundant on Earth largely thanks to the living creatures that expel them. Finding both of these
chemicals around another planet would be a strong indicator of the presence of life.

Ještě k loňskému tématu marsovských tsunami:
New study shows how impacts generated Martian tsunamis - GeoSpace - AGU Blogosphere
http://blogs.agu.org/geospace/2017/03/29/new-study-shows-impacts-generated-martian-tsunamis/

Simulation of a tsunami on Mars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xDC9ecSBgU