Remarkably inexpensive mission could find planets around the nearest sun-like stars
Remarkably inexpensive mission could find planets around the nearest sun-like stars
https://medium.com/...sive-mission-could-find-planets-around-the-nearest-sun-like-stars-4b36870c1ef7
Alpha Centauri A and B are just 4.37 light years away. Do they have planets around them? And possibly life? We just might find out!

Heino Falcke´s live interview for Al Jazeera newshour about EHT from IRAM 30 m library at Pico Veleta:
Scientists set to capture first-ever image of a Black Hole | News | Al Jazeera
http://www.aljazeera.com/.../scientists-set-capture-first-ever-image-black-hole-170413150659233.html

Another interesting view of the April 10 fireball over Southern California*

Meteor April 10, 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAdu31qiVv4

Asteroids Are Bad at Making Waves
http://www.space.com/36451-asteroids-bad-at-making-waves.html

When an asteroid hits the middle of the ocean in Hollywood movies, it creates devastating waves that wipe out coastal cities. But new simulations reveal that
real asteroids don't make such a splash. That's because the crash releases most of its energy hurling water up into the atmosphere, and very little on making waves.

"The folklore has been that tsunamis from impactors will be the danger," Galen Gisler, who studies the physics of geological processes at Los Alamos National Laboratory,
said at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference last month in The Woodlands, Texas. (Gisler also presented the work at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting
in December 2016.) He ran 3D simulations that modeled wave formation from falling rocks of various sizes, as shown in this video, and found that the waves formed by
smaller asteroids resemble landslide tsunamis on Earth.

"The splash wave can be very dangerous — out to tens of kilometers — but beyond that, they fall away more sharply," he said.

Visualization and Analysis of Threats from Asteroid Ocean Impacts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeXcgnj8AG0

Device pulls water from dry air, powered only by the sun
https://phys.org/news/2017-04-device-air-powered-sun.html

The solar-powered harvester, reported in the journal Science, was constructed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
using a special material - a metal-organic framework, or MOF - produced at the University of California, Berkeley.

"This is a major breakthrough in the long-standing challenge of harvesting water from the air at low humidity," said Omar Yaghi,
one of two senior authors of the paper, who holds the James and Neeltje Tretter chair in chemistry at UC Berkeley and is a faculty
scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "There is no other way to do that right now, except by using extra energy.
Your electric dehumidifier at home 'produces' very expensive water."

The prototype, under conditions of 20-30 percent humidity, was able to pull 2.8 liters (3 quarts) of water from the air over a 12-
hour period, using one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of MOF. Rooftop tests at MIT confirmed that the device works in real-world conditions.

James Webb Space Telescope
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzRyDodMc0c

LIGO Scientific Collaboration - The science of LSC research
http://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-O1SidebandScoX1/index.php

In 2015 the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected gravitational waves from merging black holes
(GW150914 and GW151226) during its first observing run. Although these signals originated from distances of more than a billion light
years, they were loud enough to be successfully detected despite being within LIGO's frequency band for less than a second immediately
before the black holes' catastrophic collision. We describe such short-lived signals as 'transient'.

We are also searching for quieter but long-lasting gravitational waves from another kind of source that can be much closer to us:
a rapidly spinning neutron star featuring a small distortion, which is not symmetric as it rotates, is a possible source of continuous
gravitational waves. Although sources like this are expected to be very weak, the resulting gravitational-wave signals that they produce
are persistent, so that prolonged measurements can try to extract these periodic signals from the randomly varying noise background.

NASA: Ocean Worlds
https://www.nasa.gov/specials/ocean-worlds/

Collisions generate gas in debris disks
https://phys.org/news/2017-04-collisions-gas-debris-disks.html

By examining the atomic carbon line from two young star systems—49 Ceti and Beta Pictoris—researchers had found atomic carbon
in the disk, the first time this observation has been made at sub-millimeter wavelength, hinting that the gas in debris disks
is not primordial, but rather is generated from some process of collisions taking place in the debris disk.

Remedy to “Glitch” Size Anomaly | astrobites
https://astrobites.org/2017/04/11/remedy-to-glitch-size-anomaly/

Rotating neutron stars (pulsars) can “spin-up”, or suddenly increase their rotation frequency, in an event called a glitch.
There is a scarcity of glitch observations, meaning that drawing statistical conclusions must be done with caution! Nevertheless,
some of the observed properties of glitches are quite curious. In general, the distributions of observed glitch sizes are a power
law (which would be consistent with the microscopic mechanisms believed to cause the glitches). However, the Vela pulsar, for
example, typically has large glitches which occur fairly periodically, while recent analysis of the Crab pulsar indicates there
is a deviation from a power law distribution for smaller glitch sizes. This paper tackles this discrepancy by showing that these
deviations from power law distributions can be explained naturally, using a carefully chosen model that bridges microscopic and
macroscopic scales.

Future NASA news: "A Search for Methane, Ammonia, and Water on Two Habitable Zone Super-Earths"

http://www.stsci.edu/hst/phase2-public/14682.pro

Astronomers piece together first image of black hole
https://phys.org/news/2017-04-astronomers-piece-image-black-hole.html

After training a network of telescopes stretching from Hawaii to Antarctica to Spain at the heart of our galaxy for five nights running,
astronomers said Wednesday they may have snapped the first-ever picture of a black hole.

It will take months to develop the image, but if scientists succeed the results may help peel back mysteries about what the universe is
made of and how it came into being.

"Instead of building a telescope so big that it would probably collapse under its own weight, we combined eight observatories like the pieces
of a giant mirror," said Michael Bremer, an astronomer at the International Research Institute for Radio Astronomy (IRAM) and a project manager
for the Event Horizon Telescope.

"This gave us a virtual telescope as big as Earth—about 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) is diameter," he told AFP.

The bigger the telescope, the finer the resolution and level of detail.

The targeted supermassive black hole is hidden in plain sight, lurking in the centre of the Milky Way in a region called the Sagittarius
constellation, some 26,000 light years from Earth.

Dubbed Sagittarius A* (Sgr A* for short), the gravity- and light-sucking monster weighs as much as four million Suns.

Theoretical astronomy tells us when a black hole absorbs matter—planets, debris, anything that comes too close—a brief flash of light is visible.