VIRGO: Likely transiting exocomets detected by Kepler
What’s that coming over the disk? | astrobites
https://astrobites.org/2017/08/24/whats-that-coming-over-the-disk/

During visual inspection, the light curve of KIC 3542116, a F2-type star, was found to have three asymmetric,
transit-like features with easy-to-spot depths of 0.1% over a period of 1 day. Further inspection revealed
three dips of a similar shape hidden within the Kepler data that was hidden by stellar variability.
The resulting data is shown below in figures 3 and 4.

PLATO as it is: A legacy mission for Galactic archaeology - Miglio - 2017 - Astronomische Nachrichten - Wiley Online Library
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asna.201713385/full

New Computational Model of Chemical Building Blocks May Help Explain the Origins of Life
http://www.stonybrook.edu/...model-of-chemical-building-blocks-may-help-explain-the-origins-of-life/

Scientists have yet to understand and explain how life’s informational molecules – proteins and DNA and RNA – arose from simpler chemicals
when life on earth emerged some four billion years ago. Now a research team from the Stony Brook University Laufer Center for Physical and
Quantitative Biology and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory believe they have the answer. They developed a computational model
explaining how certain molecules fold and bind together to grow longer and more complex, leading from simple chemicals to primitive biological
molecules. The findings are reported early online in PNAS.

Moon's Shadow Races Across the Clouds! Astonishing Solar Eclipse Time Lapse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13rVSwWIocE

Astronomers let gaseous disks tilt and shrink in virtual wind tunnel - Radboud University
http://www.ru.nl/english/news-agenda/news/vm/imapp/astrophysics/2017/gaseous-disks-wind-tunnel/

A team of Dutch astronomers, led by Thomas Wijnen from Radboud University, has managed to tilt and shrink gaseous disks, in which planets form,
in a virtual wind tunnel. The research helps in finding an explanation for the tilted planetary orbits in our own solar system, for example.
Wijnen and his colleagues publish their findings in two articles in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Tilting of a protoplanetary disc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsEFHAoGBg0

Sandia National Laboratories: News Releases : Black hole models contradicted by hands-on tests at Sandia’s Z machine
https://share-ng.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/black_hole/#.WaRlmTOg9hE

A long-standing but unproven assumption about the X-ray spectra of black holes in space has been
contradicted by hands-on experiments performed at Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine.

Z, the most energetic laboratory X-ray source on Earth, can duplicate the X-rays surrounding black
holes that otherwise can be watched only from a great distance and then theorized about.

“Of course, emission directly from black holes cannot be observed,” said Sandia researcher and lead
author Guillaume Loisel, lead author for a paper on the experimental results, published in August
in Physical Review Letters. “We see emission from surrounding matter just before it is consumed by
the black hole. This surrounding matter is forced into the shape of a disk, called an accretion disk.”

The results suggest revisions are needed to models previously used to interpret emissions from matter
just before it is consumed by black holes, and also the related rate of growth of mass within the black
holes. A black hole is a region of outer space from which no material and no radiation (that is, X-rays,
visible light, and so on) can escape because the gravitational field of the black hole is so intense.

Astronomy and Space News - Astro Watch: Proposed Astrophysics Mission to Conduct the First Infrared Spectral Survey of the Entire Sky
http://www.astrowatch.net/2017/08/proposed-astrophysics-mission-to.html

NASA has recently chosen six proposed astrophysics mission for concept studies. Among them is the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe,
Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer, or SPHEREx, which aims to unlock the mysteries of the universe by performing the first all-sky spectral survey.

If selected for construction and launch, the survey provided by the SPHEREx spacecraft could provide crucial insights into the origin and evolution of
galaxies, and could help scientists explore whether planets around other stars could harbor life.

“SPHEREx will produce the first infrared spectral survey of the entire sky. This survey will have broad applications in astronomy, providing rich spectra
of galaxies, quasars, stars, clusters and our Galaxy. Following the wide usage of previous all-sky surveys like the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS)
and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), SPHEREx will have a lasting value for the astronomy community,” James Bock, Principal Investigator of
SPHEREx at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), told Astrowatch.net.

VLA Reveals Distant Galaxy’s Magnetic Field – National Radio Astronomy Observatory
https://public.nrao.edu/news/vla-reveals-magnetic-field/

With the help of a gigantic cosmic lens, astronomers have measured the magnetic field of a galaxy nearly five billion light-years away.
The achievement is giving them important new clues about a problem at the frontiers of cosmology — the nature and origin of the magnetic
fields that play an important role in how galaxies develop over time.

The scientists used the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to study a star-forming galaxy that lies
directly between a more-distant quasar and Earth. The galaxy’s gravity serves as a giant lens, splitting the quasar’s image into two
separate images as seen from Earth. Importantly, the radio waves coming from this quasar, nearly 8 billion light-years away, are
preferentially aligned, or polarized.

“The polarization of the waves coming from the background quasar, combined with the fact that the waves producing the two lensed images
traveled through different parts of the intervening galaxy, allowed us to learn some important facts about the galaxy’s magnetic field,”
said Sui Ann Mao, Minerva Research Group Leader for the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.

VIRGO: dik ;-)

HADIAK: Tak to je fakt nádhera!

Cassini: The Grand Finale: NASA Announces Cassini End-of-Mission Activities
https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/3104/nasa-announces-cassini-end-of-mission-activities/

On Sept. 15, NASA's Cassini spacecraft will complete its remarkable story of exploration with an intentional plunge into Saturn's atmosphere,
ending its mission after nearly 20 years in space. News briefings, photo opportunities and other media events will be held at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and will air live on NASA Television and the agency's website.

NASA also will hold a media teleconference Tuesday, Aug. 29 to preview activities for Cassini during its final two weeks.

Media: https://www.nasa.gov/cassinitelecon

SwRI-led study captures science data from Great American Eclipse | SwRI
http://www.swri.org/press-release/swri-led-study-captures-science-data-great-american-eclipse

Two NASA WB-57F research aircraft successfully tracked the August 21 solar eclipse as part of a NASA project led by Southwest
Research Institute (SwRI) to study the solar corona and Mercury’s surface.

“The visible and infrared data look spectacular,” said SwRI senior research scientist Dr. Amir Caspi, principal investigator of
the project. “We’re already seeing some surprising features, and we are very excited to learn what the detailed analysis will reveal.”

The team began initial analysis of the data gathered during the flights, showing clear images of the Sun’s outer atmosphere and thermal
images of Mercury’s surface. Initial results are expected to be released in a few months and presented at the fall meeting of the American
Geophysical Union in December 2017.

Kepler satellite discovers variability in the Seven Sisters
http://www.ras.org.uk/...-and-press/3038-kepler-satellite-discovers-variability-in-the-seven-sisters

The Seven Sisters, as they were known to the ancient Greeks, are now known to modern astronomers as the Pleiades star cluster –
a set of stars which are visible to the naked eye and have been studied for thousands of years by cultures all over the world.
Now Dr Tim White of the Stellar Astrophysics Centre at Aarhus University and his team of Danish and international astronomers
have demonstrated a powerful new technique for observing stars such as these, which are ordinarily far too bright to look at
with high performance telescopes. Their work is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Using a new algorithm to enhance observations from the Kepler Space Telescope in its K2 Mission, the team has performed
the most detailed study yet of the variability of these stars. Satellites such as Kepler are engineered to search for planets
orbiting distant stars by looking for the dip in brightness as the planets pass in front, and also to do asteroseismology,
studying the structure and evolution of stars as revealed by changes in their brightness.
structure and evolution of stars as revealed by changes in their brightness.