Massive star's dying blast caught by rapid-response telescopes
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-massive-star-dying-blast-caught.html

In June 2016, an international team of 31 astronomers, led by the University of Maryland's Eleanora Troja and including
Arizona State University's Nathaniel Butler, caught a massive star as it died in a titanic explosion deep in space.

The blast of the dying star released in about 40 seconds as much energy as the Sun releases over its entire lifetime,
all focused into a tight beam of gamma rays aimed by chance toward Earth.

The team's findings, reported in the scientific journal Nature, provide strong evidence for one of two competing models
for how gamma-ray bursters (GRBs) produce their energy.

Comet C2015 ER61 Panstars taken by Salvador Torres Morales on July 26, 2017 @ San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Space in Images - 2017 - 06 - Euclid flagship mock galaxy catalogue
http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2017/06/Euclid_flagship_mock_galaxy_catalogue

ESA’s Euclid mission, to be launched in 2020, is set to provide a unique window into the evolution of our 13.8 billion year-old Universe.
It will map the history of the Universe’s structure by studying billions of galaxies. In this way, it will be able to probe the nature of
invisible dark matter, which makes itself known by the forces it exerts on ordinary matter, and the mysterious dark energy that drives
the accelerating expansion of the Universe.

Mars rover spots clouds shaped by gravity waves | Science | AAAS
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/mars-rover-spots-clouds-shaped-gravity-waves

NASA’s Curiosity rover usually keeps its instruments firmly focused on Mars’s ground, zapping grit with its laser or drilling
cores in bedrock. But every few days, the SUV-sized robot, like any good dreamer, shifts its sights upward to the clouds.

Well into its fifth year, the rover has now shot more than 500 movies of the clouds above it, including the first ground-based
view of martian clouds shaped by gravity waves, researchers reported here this week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.
(Gravity waves, common atmospheric ripples on Earth that result from air trying to regain its vertical balance, should not be
confused with gravitational waves, cosmological ripples in spacetime.) The shots are the best record made so far of a mysterious
recurring belt of equatorial clouds known to influence the martian climate.

Four new short-period giant planets discovered
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-short-period-giant-planets.html

Astronomers have detected four new giant exoplanets as part of the Hungarian-made Automated Telescope Network-South (HATSouth) exoplanet survey.
The newly found alien worlds are about the size of Jupiter, but less massive. They transit moderately bright stars and have short orbital periods.
The findings were presented July 22 in a paper published on arXiv.org.

HATSouth is a network of six astrograph telescope systems located in South America, Africa, and Australia. These telescopes are designed to detect
transiting extrasolar planets in orbit around relatively bright stars visible from the Southern hemisphere. Since its launch in 2009, the network
has already detected dozens of transiting exoplanets.

Now, the list of planets detected by HATSouth has expanded. In a recent paper, a team of researchers led by Rafael Brahm of the Pontifical Catholic
University of Chile in Santiago presents the discovery of four new planets, HATS-43b, HATS-44b, HATS-45b, and HATS-46b. The planetary nature of
transiting signals detected by HATSouth was confirmed by follow-up spectroscopic and photometric observations using various instruments, including
the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) network at the Cerro Tololo International Observatory (CTIO) in Chile.

This extensive observational campaign that led to the discovery of four new alien worlds was carried out from December 2009 to October 2016.

Cosmologists produce new maps of dark matter dynamics | UoP News
http://uopnews.port.ac.uk/2017/07/25/cosmologists-produce-new-maps-of-dark-matter-dynamics/

New maps of dark matter dynamics in the Universe have been produced by a team of international cosmologists.

Using advanced computer modelling techniques, the research team has translated the distribution of galaxies into detailed maps of matter
streams and velocities for the first time. The research was carried out by leading cosmologists from the UK, France and Germany.

The researchers used legacy survey data obtained during 2000 – 2008 from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), a major three-dimensional
survey of the Universe. The survey has deep multi-colour images of one fifth of the sky and spectra for more than 900,000 galaxies.

The new dark matter maps cover the Northern Sky up to a distance of 600 megaparsecs, which is the equivalent of looking back about two
billion years. The researchers used a set of phase-space analysis tools and built on research from 2015, which reconstructed the initial
conditions of the nearby Universe.

The Story of a Boring Encounter with a Black Hole
http://aasnova.org/2017/07/24/the-story-of-a-boring-encounter-with-a-black-hole/

Remember the excitement three years ago before the gas cloud G2’s encounter with the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sgr A*?
Did you notice that not much was said about it after the fact? That’s because not much happened — and a new study suggests that this isn’t surprising.

G2, an object initially thought to be a gas cloud, was expected to make its closest approach to the 4.6-million-solar-mass Sgr A* in 2014. At the pericenter
of its orbit, G2 was predicted to pass as close as 36 light-hours from the black hole. This close brush with such a massive black hole was predicted to tear
G2 apart, causing much of its material to accrete onto Sgr A*. It was thought that this process would temporarily increase the accretion rate onto the black
hole relative to its normal background accretion rate, causing Sgr A*’s luminosity to increase for a time.

Instead, Sgr A* showed a distinct lack of fireworks, with very minimal change to its brightness after G2’s closest approach. This “cosmic fizzle” has raised
questions about the nature of G2: was it really a gas cloud? What else might it have been instead? Now, a team of scientists led by Brian Morsony (University
of Maryland and University of Wisconsin-Madison) have run a series of simulations of the encounter to try to address these questions.