New Horizons Unveils New Maps of Pluto, Charon on Flyby Anniversary
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-unveils-new-maps-of-pluto-charon-on-flyby-anniversary

On July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made its historic flight through the Pluto system – providing the first close-up images of Pluto
and its moons and collecting other data that has transformed our understanding of these mysterious worlds on the solar system’s outer frontier.

Scientists are still analyzing and uncovering data that New Horizons recorded and sent home after the encounter. On the two-year anniversary of
the flyby, the team is unveiling a set of detailed, high-quality global maps of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon.

Complex Gas Motion in the Centre of the Milky Way - Communications and Marketing - Heidelberg University
http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/presse/news2017/pm20170713_milchstrasse_en.html

How does the gas in the centre of the Milky Way behave? Researchers from Heidelberg University, in collaboration with colleagues
from the University of Oxford, recently investigated the motion of gas clouds in a comprehensive computer simulation. The new model
finally makes it possible to conclusively explain this complex gas motion. Astrophysicists Dr Mattia C. Sormani (Heidelberg) and Matthew
Ridley (Oxford) conducted the research, on Heidelberg’s part, at the Collaborative Research Centre "The Milky Way System" (CRC 881).

Take a 360° spin through the heart of the sun | Science | AAAS
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/take-360-spin-through-heart-sun

360 Video: Inside the heart of a star's magnetic field.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSoyqFcK22k

Researchers describe one of the most massive large-scale structures in the universe
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-massive-large-scale-universe.html

A team of astronomers from the Inter University Centre for Astronomy & Astrophysics (IUCAA), and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER),
both in Pune, India, and members of two other Indian universities, have identified a previously unknown, extremely large supercluster of galaxies located in
the direction of constellation Pisces. This is one of the largest known structures in the nearby Universe, and is at a distance of 4,000 million (400 crore)
light-years away from us.

This novel discovery is being published in the latest issue of The Astrophysical Journal, the premier research journal of the American Astronomical Society.

Large-scale structures in the Universe are found to be hierarchically assembled, with galaxies, together with associated gas, and dark matter, being clumped
in clusters, which are organized with other clusters, smaller groups, filaments, sheets and large empty regions ("voids") in a pattern called the "Cosmic web"
which spans the observable Universe.

Superclusters are the largest coherent structures in the Cosmic Web. A Supercluster is a chain of galaxies and galaxy clusters, bound by gravity, often
stretching to several hundred times the size of clusters of galaxies, consisting of tens of thousands of galaxies. This newly-discovered 'Saraswati'
supercluster, for instance, extends over a scale of 600 million light-years and may contain the mass equivalent of over 20 million billion suns.

A New Search for Extrasolar Planets from the Arecibo Observatory - Planetary Habitability Laboratory @ UPR Arecibo
http://phl.upr.edu/press-releases/barnard

The National Science Foundation’s Arecibo Observatory and the Planetary Habitability Laboratory of the University of Puerto Rico
at Arecibo joined the Red Dots project in the search for new planets around our nearest stars. This new collaboration will
simultaneously observe in both the optical and radio spectrum Barnard’s Star, a popular star in the science fiction literature.

Barnard's star is a low-mass red dwarf almost six light-years away and the second-closest stellar system to our Sun after
the Alpha Centauri triple-star system. There are hints of a possible super-Earth mass planet in a cold orbit around this star.

The Arecibo Observatory has a new campaign to observe nearby red dwarf stars with planets. The purpose of this campaign is to detect
radio emissions from these stars, such as from flares, to help characterize their radiation and magnetic environment and any potential
perturbations due to other bodies. These perturbations might reveal the presence of new sub-stellar objects including planets.

Barnard’s Star will be the eighth red dwarf star to be recently observed by the Arecibo Observatory. Results from Gliese 436, Ross 128,
Wolf 359, HD 95735, BD +202465, V* RY Sex, and K2-18 are currently being analyzed. These observations are led by Prof. Abel Méndez,
Director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo in collaboration with Dr. Jorge Zuluaga
from the Universidad de Antioquia in Colombia.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15978

The Eridania region in the southern highlands of Mars once contained a vast inland sea with a volume of water greater than that of all other Martian lakes combined.
Here we show that the most ancient materials within Eridania are thick (>400 m), massive (not bedded), mottled deposits containing saponite, talc-saponite, Fe-rich
mica (for example, glauconite-nontronite), Fe- and Mg-serpentine, Mg-Fe-Ca-carbonate and probable Fe-sulphide that likely formed in a deep water (500–1,500 m)
hydrothermal setting. The Eridania basin occurs within some of the most ancient terrain on Mars where striking evidence for remnant magnetism might suggest an early
phase of crustal spreading. The relatively well-preserved seafloor hydrothermal deposits in Eridania are contemporaneous with the earliest evidence for life on Earth
in potentially similar environments 3.8 billion years ago, and might provide an invaluable window into the environmental conditions of early Earth.

How to Find an Inhabited Exoplanet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f5wV4KRZXU

Chandra Peers into a Nurturing Cloud | NASA
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/images/chandra-peers-into-a-nurturing-cloud.html

The giant molecular cloud known as W51 is one of the closest to Earth at a distance of about 17,000 light years. Because of its
relative proximity, W51 provides astronomers with an excellent opportunity to study how stars are forming in our Milky Way galaxy.

A new composite image of W51 shows the high-energy output from this stellar nursery, where X-rays from Chandra are colored blue.
In about 20 hours of Chandra exposure time, over 600 young stars were detected as point-like X-ray sources, and diffuse X-ray emission
from interstellar gas with a temperature of a million degrees or more was also observed. Infrared light observed with NASA’s Spitzer
Space Telescope appears orange and yellow-green and shows cool gas and stars surrounded by disks of cool material.

A Tour of W51
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwrQsXWpXSw

New 'hot Jupiter' with short orbital period discovered
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-hot-jupiter-short-orbital-period.html

An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a new "hot Jupiter" exoplanet with a short orbital period
of just three and a half days. The newly detected giant planet, designated KELT-20b, circles a rapidly rotating star known
as HD 185603 (or KELT-20). The finding was presented in a paper published July 5 on arXiv.org.

The new planet was identified by a group of researchers led by Michael Lund of the Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
The astronomers observed HD 185603 using the KELT-North telescope in Arizona to identify the initial transit signal of a potential
planet. The observations were made as part of the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) survey, which is dedicated to
searching for transiting exoplanets around bright stars.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/nasas-sdo-watches-a-sunspot-turn-toward-earth

An active region on the sun — an area of intense and complex magnetic fields — has rotated into view on the sun and seems to be growing
rather quickly in this video captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory between July 5-11, 2017. Such sunspots are a common occurrence
on the sun, but are less frequent as we head toward solar minimum, which is the period of low solar activity during its regular approximately
11-year cycle. This sunspot is the first to appear after the sun was spotless for two days, and it is the only sunspot group at this moment.
Like freckles on the face of the sun, they appear to be small features, but size is relative: The dark core of this sunspot is actually
larger than Earth.

NASA’s SDO Watches a Sunspot Turn Toward Earth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNng0KrNUuI

National Optical Astronomy Observatory Press Release: Distant Galaxies ‘Lift the Veil’ on the End of the Cosmic Dark Ages
https://www.noao.edu/news/2017/pr1703.php

Astronomers studying the distant Universe have found that small star-forming galaxies were abundant when the Universe was only 800 million years old,
a few percent of its present age. The results suggest that the earliest galaxies, which illuminated and ionized the Universe, formed at even earlier times.

Long ago, about 300,000 years after the beginning of the Universe (the Big Bang), the Universe was dark. There were as yet no stars and galaxies, and
the Universe was filled with neutral hydrogen gas. At some point the first galaxies appeared, and their energetic radiation ionized their surroundings,
the intergalactic gas, illuminating and transforming the Universe.

Smallest-ever star discovered by astronomers | University of Cambridge
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/smallest-ever-star-discovered-by-astronomers

The smallest star yet measured has been discovered by a team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge. With a size just a sliver
larger than that of Saturn, the gravitational pull at its stellar surface is about 300 times stronger than what humans feel on Earth.

These very small and dim stars are also the best possible candidates for detecting Earth-sized planets which can have liquid water on their
surfaces, such as TRAPPIST-1, an ultracool dwarf surrounded by seven temperate Earth-sized worlds.

The newly-measured star, called EBLM J0555-57Ab, is located about six hundred light years away. It is part of a binary system, and was
identified as it passed in front of its much larger companion, a method which is usually used to detect planets, not stars. Details will
be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.