Our View of the Cosmos Is About to Get a Tremendous Upgrade
https://futurism.com/2-the-way-were-looking-for-alien-life-is-changing/

Nasa's Kepler Telescope has confirmed 3486 exoplanets, 361 of which it considers terrestrial:
how are scientists responding to the question of how to detect life on these promising but distant worlds?

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpViVEO-ymc

https://www.nasa.gov/...re/goddard/2017/nasas-van-allen-probes-spot-man-made-barrier-shrouding-earth

Humans have long been shaping Earth’s landscape, but now scientists know we can shape our near-space environment as well.
A certain type of communications — very low frequency, or VLF, radio communications — have been found to interact with particles
in space, affecting how and where they move. At times, these interactions can create a barrier around Earth against natural high
energy particle radiation in space. These results, part of a comprehensive paper on human-induced space weather, were recently
published in Space Science Reviews.

NASA's Van Allen Probes Find Human-Made Bubble Shrouding Earth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFYoYUBGw4s

Astronomers Found Spirals Inside a Dust Gap of a Young Star Forming Disk
http://www.almaobservatory.org/...omers-found-spirals-inside-a-dust-gap-of-a-young-star-forming-disk

Planets form within disks composed of dust grains and gas. Planets can gather dust grains from their orbits, resulting in dust gaps or cavities,
and can also cause spiral waves within the parental disks based on theoretical predictions. To understand where and when planets can form at early
stages, ALMA’s capability of seeing disk material with high resolution can depict smoking-gun evidence of infant planets hidden in disks.

Both dust gaps and spirals have been seen separately in a handful of disks. The new ALMA images of AB Aurigae clearly depict gas spirals inside
a wide dust gap. These first reported gas spirals within a dust gap might indicate that there are at least 2 planets within this system. One planet
at a distance of 80 astronomical units (au; the distance between the Sun and Earth) from the star is required to create the sharp dust ring.
An additional planet at 30 au or closer from the star is required to produce such spirals.

Anna Bilous & Vlad Kondratiev: LOFAR's view on pulsar sky
ASTRON JIVE Daily Image
http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/index.html?main.php?date=20160909

Imagine you are a sentient alien creature with a pair of superb radio eyes, capable of discerning
even the most minute splashes of radio emission... how would the night sky look to you? The image
above may give a clue to that. On top of the diffuse black-and-white Galactic background, the swarm
of color dots provides a one-second glimpse into the life of 158 northern pulsars, with the course
of time slowed down by a factor of 10.

These pulsars were observed within the LOFAR Pulsar HBA Census -- a large project which aims at
creating the first uniform low-frequency (110-188 MHz) portrait of all known non-recycled pulsars
in certain regions of the sky. All 196 pulsars with well-known positions within the grey lines were
observed, regardless of their estimated brightness and scattering level. Only 38 of those pulsars
escaped detection (still dots with black edges).

FADO—a ground-breaking tool to reconstruct the history of galaxies
https://phys.org/news/2017-05-fadoa-ground-breaking-tool-reconstruct-history.html

FADO is a new analysis tool developed by Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA) astronomers Jean Michel Gomes and
Polychronis Papaderos, which uses light emitted by both stars and ionized gas in a galaxy to reconstruct its formation history by
means of genetic algorithms. This tool was presented in a recent article, accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Astronomers characterize two 'super-Earths' in a distant planetary system
https://phys.org/news/2017-05-astronomers-characterize-super-earths-distant-planetary.html

An international team of astronomers led by Eike W. Guenther of the Thuringian State Observatory in Tautenburg, Germany,
has characterized two "super-Earth" exoplanets orbiting a distant star designated K2-106, determining their size, mass
and density. The new findings were presented in a paper published May 11 on the arXiv pre-print server.

Located approximately 825 light years away from the Earth, K2-106 is a 5 billion-year-old star of spectral type G5. With
a radius of about 0.83 solar radii, the star is 7 percent less massive than the sun. In 2016, researchers detected two
planets transiting this star with orbital periods of 0.57 and 13.3 days.

Featured news - Scientists take first tentative steps to explore potential climate of Proxima B - University of Exeter
http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/featurednews/title_583299_en.html

Scientists take first tentative steps to explore potential climate of Proxima B

The quest to discover whether a planet orbiting our closest neighbouring star, Proxima Centauri (4.2 light
years or 25 trillion miles from Earth), has the potential to support life has taken a new, exhilarating twist.

Variable Winds on Hot Giant Exoplanet Help Study of Magnetic Field | Planetary Science Institute
http://www.psi.edu/news/press-releases/

Senior Scientist Tamara M. Rogers of the Planetary Science Institute has discovered that substantial variability in the winds on the hot giant
exoplanet HAT-P-7b are due to magnetism, and used those measurements to develop a new method to constrain the magnetic field of such an object.

HAT-P-7b was discovered by NASA’s Kepler Mission in 2008. It is nearly 40 percent larger and nearly 80 percent more massive than Jupiter.
It orbits its star every couple of days, and is so close that dayside temperature may be 2,200 degrees Kelvin (3,500 degrees Fahrenheit)
with a night side 1,000 Kelvin (1,340 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler.

Obscured Supermassive Black Holes in Galaxiessu201717 | www.cfa.harvard.edu/
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/su201717

CfA astronomers Francesca Civano and Stefano Marchesi and their colleagues prepared a precisely defined sample of obscured AGN -- those whose infrared emission
is more than twenty times larger than its X-ray emission (the X-ray emission was measured by the Chandra X-ray Observatory). They first collected a set of 265
AGN and then determined which ones were "obscured" by calculating the infrared emission of each to ratio with its X-ray emission. They did this by assembling
the full spectral distribution of the radiation, combining infrared with UV and optical data and then modeling the entire distribution to determine the total
infrared component from the AGN alone with a code that models and subtracts the contributions from stars and other processes. Once they had the infrared value,
they could tell which ones qualified as "obscured." Their final sample of obscured AGN had 182 objects.

New 'styrofoam' planet provides tools in search for habitable planets
https://phys.org/news/2017-05-styrofoam-planet-tools-habitable-planets.html

Fifth-graders making styrofoam solar system models may have the right idea. Researchers at Lehigh University have discovered a new planet orbiting
a star 320 light years from Earth that has the density of styrofoam. This "puffy planet" outside our solar system may hold opportunities for testing
atmospheres that will be useful when assessing future planets for signs of life.

The research, "KELT-11b: A Highly Inflated Sub-Saturn Exoplanet Transiting the V+8 Subgiant HD 93396," is published online in The Astronomical Journal.

https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/science/rings/

Scientists have never before studied the size, temperature, composition and distribution of Saturn’s rings from Saturn orbit. Cassini has captured extraordinary
ring-moon interactions, observed the lowest ring-temperature ever recorded at Saturn, discovered that the moon Enceladus is the source for Saturn’s E ring, and
viewed the rings at equinox when sunlight strikes the rings edge-on, revealing never-before-seen ring features and details.

A Cold War Among Cosmologists Turns Hot - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/a-cold-war-among-cosmologists-turns-hot/526329/
Two camps of theorists are bickering in public—with one saying the others’ ideas don’t even qualify as science.