Alien aurorae on Uranus | ESA/Hubble
http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1714a/

The alien aurorae on Jupiter and Saturn are well-studied, but not much is known about the aurorae of the giant ice planet Uranus. In 2011,
the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope became the first Earth-based telescope to snap an image of the aurorae on Uranus. In 2012 and 2014 astronomers
took a second look at the aurorae using the ultraviolet capabilities of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) installed on Hubble.

This is a composite image of Uranus by Voyager 2 and two different observations made by Hubble — one for the ring and one for the aurorae.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-halfway-from-pluto-to-next-flyby-target

Continuing on its path through the outer regions of the solar system, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has now traveled half the distance from Pluto –
its storied first target – to 2014 MU69, the Kuiper Belt object (KBO) it will fly past on Jan. 1, 2019. The spacecraft reached that milestone at midnight
(UTC) on April 3 – or 8 p.m. ET on April 2 – when it was 486.19 million miles (782.45 million kilometers) beyond Pluto and the same distance from MU69.

“It’s fantastic to have completed half the journey to our next flyby; that flyby will set the record for the most distant world ever explored
in the history of civilization,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Later this week – at 21:24 UTC (or 5:24 p.m. ET) on April 7 – New Horizons will also reach the halfway point in time between closest approaches to Pluto,
which occurred at 7:48 a.m. ET on July 14, 2015, and MU69, predicted for 2 a.m. ET on New Year’s Day 2019. The nearly five-day difference between the halfway
markers of distance and time is due to the gravitational tug of the sun. The spacecraft is actually getting slightly slower as it pulls away from the sun’s
gravity, so the spacecraft crosses the midpoint in distance a bit before it passes the midpoint in time.

Portrait of a black hole | Max Planck Society
https://www.mpg.de/11201633/event-horizon-telescope-iram

IRAM’s 30-metre dish is part of the Event Horizon Telescope which is looking into the centre of the Milky Way

Astronomers want to record an image of the heart of our galaxy for the first time: a global collaboration of radio dishes is to take a detailed look
at the black hole which is assumed to be located there. This Event Horizon Telescope links observatories all over the world to form a huge telescope,
from Europe via Chile and Hawaii right down to the South Pole. IRAM’s 30-metre telescope, an installation co-financed by the Max Planck Society, is
the only station in Europe to be participating in the observation campaign. The Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy is also involved with
the measurements, which are to run from 4 to 14 April initially.

IRAM 30-meter telescope by DiVertiCimes
https://vimeo.com/182366965

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