http://minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?object_id=3122

https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/about/neo_groups.html

Potentially hazardous asteroid 3122 (1981 ET 3) Florence (named after Florence Nightingale) was discovered back in March 1981 by American
astronomer Schelte Bus at the Siding Spring Observatory, New South Wales. It orbits the Sun once every 2 years and 4 months. On September 01,
2017, the 4.35 kilometer space rock will fly by the Earth at a distance of just under 4.4 million miles. It sounds far but this is close enough
for an object of this size to be observed in a small telescope if you know where to look. This is the closest this asteroid has has passed
the Earth since 1890.

Thought to be the parent body of the Geminid meteor shower, this is one of the largest asteroids on the Potentially Harzardous Asteroid list.

Current estimates expect the asteroid to reach around visual magnitude 9 making it a relatively easy target for backyard astronomers at a dark
site. It will be travelling at over 30,000 miles per hour however because of its distance, the small speck of light will appear to move quite
slowly in the sky against the background stars.

http://www.cometwatch.co.uk/asteroid-3122-florence-earth-flyby/

https://watchers.news/2017/08/14/3122-florence-asteroid-flyby-september-1-2017/

Voyager 2's 11 billion mile journey at a human scale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgDr26MvWKQ

Cosmic Magnifying Lens Reveals Inner Jets of Black Holes | Caltech
http://www.caltech.edu/news/cosmic-magnifying-lens-reveals-inner-jets-black-holes-79330

Astronomers using Caltech's Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) have found evidence for a bizarre lensing system in space,
in which a large assemblage of stars is magnifying a much more distant galaxy containing a jet-spewing supermassive black hole.
The discovery provides the best view yet of blobs of hot gas that shoot out from supermassive black holes.

In Hunting Supernovae, 'Get Them While They're Young' | UANews
https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/hunting-supernovae-get-them-while-theyre-young

Thanks to a global network of telescopes, astronomers have caught the fleeting explosion of a Type Ia supernova
in unprecedented detail. Because this type of supernova is commonly used as a cosmic yardstick, a better understanding
of how they form could have implications for future dark energy measurements.

Tidally locked exoplanets may be more common than previously thought | UW News
http://www.washington.edu/...4/tidally-locked-exoplanets-may-be-more-common-than-previously-thought/

Many exoplanets to be found by coming high-powered telescopes will probably be tidally locked — with one side permanently
facing their host star — according to new research by astronomer Rory Barnes of the University of Washington.

Barnes, a UW assistant professor of astronomy and astrobiology, arrived at the finding by questioning the long-held assumption that only those stars
that are much smaller and dimmer than the sun could host orbiting planets that were in synchronous orbit, or tidally locked, as the moon is with the
Earth. His paper, “Tidal Locking of Habitable Exoplanets,” has been accepted for publication by the journal Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy.

Tidal locking results when there is no side-to-side momentum between a body in space and its gravitational partner and they become fixed in their embrace.
Tidally locked bodies such as the Earth and moon are in synchronous rotation, meaning that each takes exactly as long to rotate around its own axis as it
does to revolve around its host star or gravitational partner. The moon takes 27 days to rotate once on its axis, and 27 days to orbit the Earth once.

ISS Crew Readies for Unique View of the Solar Eclipse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0WJFIVQOv4

Tracking a solar eruption through the Solar System / Space Science / Our Activities / ESA
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Tracking_a_solar_eruption_through_the_Solar_System

Ten spacecraft, from ESA’s Venus Express to NASA’s Voyager-2, felt the effect of a solar eruption as it washed through
the Solar System while three other satellites watched, providing a unique perspective on this space weather event.

Scientists working on ESA’s Mars Express were looking forward to investigating the effects of the close encounter of Comet
Siding Spring on the Red Planet’s atmosphere on 19 October 2014, but instead they found what turned out to be the imprint
of a solar event.

While this made the analysis of any comet-related effects far more complex than anticipated, it triggered one of the largest
collaborative efforts to trace the journey of an interplanetary ‘coronal mass ejection’ – a CME – from the Sun to the far
reaches of the outer Solar System.

Although Earth itself was not in the firing line, a number of Sun-watching satellites near Earth – ESA’s Proba-2, the ESA/NASA
SOHO and NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory – had witnessed a powerful solar eruption a few days earlier, on 14 October.

NASA’s Stereo-A not only captured images of the other side of the Sun with respect to Earth, but also collected in situ
information as the CME rushed passed.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/trappist-1-is-older-than-our-solar-system

At the time of its discovery, scientists believed the TRAPPIST-1 system had to be at least 500 million years old, since it takes stars of TRAPPIST-1’s low mass
(roughly 8 percent that of the Sun) roughly that long to contract to its minimum size, just a bit larger than the planet Jupiter. However, even this lower age
limit was uncertain; in theory, the star could be almost as old as the universe itself. Are the orbits of this compact system of planets stable? Might life have
enough time to evolve on any of these worlds?

Have Two Lonely Trans-Neptunian Objects Found Each Other?
http://aasnova.org/2017/08/11/have-two-lonely-trans-neptunian-objects-found-each-other/

A new study has identified 2004 TT357 as a body that may be made up of two separate objects in contact with each other.

Though Hubble can’t recognize distant contact binaries because the components are too close together, we can potentially
identify them from their characteristic light curves. But this is a challenging process, and so far we’ve only found one
confirmed trans-Neptunian-object (TNO) contact binary and one candidate — despite predictions that 10–30% of TNOs could
be contact binaries.

Now, new observations from the 4.3-m Lowell Observatory Discovery Channel Telescope, presented in a study led by Audrey
Thirouin (Lowell Observatory), have resulted in the identification of a potential new TNO contact binary.

https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/...lactic-winds-push-researchers-to-probe-galaxies-at-unprecedented-scale/

When astronomers peer into the universe, what they see often exceeds the limits of human understanding.
Such is the case with low-mass galaxies—galaxies a fraction of the size of our own Milky Way.

These small, faint systems made up of millions or billions of stars, dust, and gas constitute the most common type
of galaxy observed in the universe. But according to astrophysicists’ most advanced models, low-mass galaxies should
contain many more stars than they appear to contain.

Cool Cloud
https://vimeo.com/228856875

The Implications of Cosmic Silence | University of Arkansas
http://news.uark.edu/articles/39255/the-implications-of-cosmic-silence

The universe is incomprehensibly vast, with billions of other planets circling billions of other stars.
The potential for intelligent life to exist somewhere out there should be enormous.

So, where is everybody?

That’s the Fermi paradox in a nutshell. Daniel Whitmire, a retired astrophysicist who teaches mathematics
at the University of Arkansas, once thought the cosmic silence indicated we as a species lagged far behind.

“I taught astronomy for 37 years,” said Whitmire. “I used to tell my students that by statistics, we have
to be the dumbest guys in the galaxy. After all we have only been technological for about 100 years while
other civilizations could be more technologically advanced than us by millions or billions of years.”

Recently, however, he’s changed his mind. By applying a statistical concept called the principle of mediocrity –
the idea that in the absence of any evidence to the contrary we should consider ourselves typical, rather than
atypical – Whitmire has concluded that instead of lagging behind, our species may be average. That’s not good news.

In a paper published Aug. 3 in the International Journal of Astrobiology, Whitmire argues that if we are typical,
it follows that species such as ours go extinct soon after attaining technological knowledge.

The argument is based on two observations: We are the first technological species to evolve on Earth, and we are
early in our technological development. (He defines “technological” as a biological species that has developed
electronic devices and can significantly alter the planet.)

The first observation seems obvious, but as Whitmire notes in his paper, researchers believe the Earth should be
habitable for animal life at least a billion years into the future. Based on how long it took proto-primates to
evolve into a technological species, that leaves enough time for it to happen again up to 23 times. On that time
scale, there could have been others before us, but there’s nothing in the geologic record to indicate we weren’t
the first. “We’d leave a heck of a fingerprint if we disappeared overnight,” Whitmire noted.

http://realdanielwhitmire.wixsite.com/home/copy-of-astrobiology-1