University of Glasgow - University news - New research uncovers 90 million years of history of Martian volcano
https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_551973_en.html

Analysis of Martian meteorites has uncovered 90 million years’ worth of new information about one of the red planet’s volcanoes –
and helped pinpoint which volcano the meteorites came from.

Geologists based in the UK and the USA have used advanced mass spectrometry techniques to learn more about the origins of six meteorites
known as ‘nakhlites’ – pieces of Martian terrain which were blasted from the face of the red planet by an impact event 11 million years ago,
then drifted through space before landing on Earth.

Nakhlite meteorites are the second most common type of Martian meteorites. Three of the meteorites were found in Antarctica, one in the USA,
one in northwestern Africa, and one in Egypt.

Their findings, which show that the Martian volcano erupted at least four times over the course of 90 million years, appear in a new paper
in the journal Nature Communications, published today (Wednesday 4 October).



Monster volcanoes on Mars: how space rocks are helping us solve their mysteries
https://theconversation.com/...es-on-mars-how-space-rocks-are-helping-us-solve-their-mysteries-85045

Spacecraft have sent back stunning images and data about these volcanoes over the years, yielding an amazing amount of knowledge. We have
learned a lot from the impact craters made by asteroids, for example, since older areas on the planet have more craters than younger areas.

From this, scientists have concluded that the volcanoes on Mars began erupting well over 3.5 billion years ago, roughly comparable to how
far back eruptions go on Earth. The most recent Martian eruptions are perhaps a few tens of millions of years old. No active volcanoes have
been discovered; at least not yet.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/nasa-s-webb-telescope-to-witness-galactic-infancy

Scientists will use NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to study sections of the sky previously observed by NASA’s Great Observatories,
including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope, to understand the creation of the universe’s first galaxies and stars.

Milky Way’s “most-mysterious star” continues to confound | Carnegie Institution for Science
https://carnegiescience.edu/node/2246

The latest findings from Carnegie’s Josh Simon and Benjamin Shappee and collaborators take a longer look at the star,
going back to 2006—before its strange behavior was detected by Kepler. Astronomers had thought that the star was only
getting fainter with time, but the new study shows that it also brightened significantly in 2007 and 2014. These
unexpected episodes complicate or rule out nearly all the proposed ideas to explain the star’s observed strangeness.

Speculation to account for KIC 8462852’s dips in brightness has ranged from it having swallowed a nearby planet to
an unusually large group of comets orbiting the star to an alien megastructure.

In general, stars can appear to dim because a solid object like a planet or a cloud of dust and gas passes between it
and the observer, eclipsing and effectively dimming its brightness for a time. But even before this evidence of two
periods of increased brightness in the star’s past, the erratic dimming periods seen in KIC 8462852 were unlike anything
astronomers had previously observed.

Last year, Simon and Ben Montet (then at Caltech, now at University of Chicago), who is also a co-author on this current
study, found that from 2009 to 2012, KIC 8462852 dimmed by almost 1 percent. Its brightness then dropped by an extraordinary
2 percent over just six months, remaining at about that level for the final six months of Kepler observations.




https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/mysterious-dimming-of-tabbys-star-may-be-caused-by-dust

One of the most mysterious stellar objects may be revealing some of its secrets at last.

A new study using NASA's Spitzer and Swift missions, as well as the Belgian AstroLAB IRIS observatory, suggests that the cause of the dimming over long periods
is likely an uneven dust cloud moving around the star. This flies in the face of the "alien megastructure" idea and the other more exotic speculations.

The smoking gun: Researchers found less dimming in the infrared light from the star than in its ultraviolet light. Any object larger than dust particles would
dim all wavelengths of light equally when passing in front of Tabby's Star.

"This pretty much rules out the alien megastructure theory, as that could not explain the wavelength-dependent dimming," said Huan Meng, at the University of
Arizona, Tucson, who is lead author of the new study published in The Astrophysical Journal. "We suspect, instead, there is a cloud of dust orbiting the star
with a roughly 700-day orbital period."

Woow!!

A chat with Vít Kučera | ALICE Matters
http://alicematters.web.cern.ch/?q=content%2Fnode%2F1048

Vít Kučera has been recently awarded the 2016 ALICE thesis prize for his work on strange particle production in jets,
which he carried out at the Charles University in Prague and the University of Strasbourg. Currently a postdoc with
the Czech Academy of Sciences, he is continuing his research career in ALICE and is going to spend much time at CERN
in the next years.

When choosing his Master’s Course, he found himself hesitating between particle physics and astrophysics, since he was
very fond of both fundamental physics and astronomy. Besides, he was a guide for an observatory. In the end, he decided
to go for particle physics and, during his studies at the Charles University in Prague, he started a collaboration with
ALICE. “I got very interested in heavy-ion physics, since in some way it combines my two interests: the origin of
the universe on one side and subatomic physics on the other,” explains Vít.

Konečně!!

BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017
with one half to Rainer Weiss and the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne at LIGO/VIRGO COLLABORATION LIGO Scientific Collaboration
“for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”.

On 14 September 2015, the universe’s gravitational waves were observed for the very first time. The waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein a hundred
years ago, came from a collision between two black holes. It took 1.3 billion years for the waves to arrive at the LIGO detector in the USA.

The signal was extremely weak when it reached Earth, but is already promising a revolution in astrophysics. Gravitational waves are an entirely new way of
observing the most violent events in space and testing the limits of our knowledge.

LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, is a collaborative project with over one thousand researchers from more than twenty countries.
Together, they have realised a vision that is almost fifty years old. The 2017 Nobel Laureates have, with their enthusiasm and determination, each been
invaluable to the success of LIGO. Pioneers Rainer Weiss and Kip S. Thorne, together with Barry C. Barish, the scientist and leader who brought the project
to completion, ensured that four decades of effort led to gravitational waves finally being observed.

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2017/popular-physicsprize2017.pdf

Unexpected surprise: A final image from Rosetta
https://phys.org/news/2017-09-unexpected-image-rosetta.html
Unexpected surprise: a final image from Rosetta / Rosetta / Space Science / Our Activities / ESA
http://www.esa.int/...ctivities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Unexpected_surprise_a_final_image_from_Rosetta

Russia And The US Will Work Together on The First-Ever Moon Station

In Spring of 2017, NASA revealed their plans for what the massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket would be used for: to build the Deep Space Gateway, a space station in cis-lunar orbit that'll serve as a stepping stone to the exploration of the Solar System.

Until today, it was assumed that this would be a NASA project, with the agency constructing the station over the course of several launches of the SLS from 2021 through 2026, delivering the 4 major modules. The details were hazy, though, with the various components in development with various contractors.

Today, however, NASA and the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos announced that they'll be building the Deep Space Gateway together. They signed an agreement in Australia at the 68th International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, and announced the news to the world.

Where Do We Go Next? Building the Deep Space Gateway
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFs1EzRb--Y

Three-detector observation of #GravitationalWaves from #blackhole merger #GW170814 by @LIGO & @EGO_Virgo http://www.ligo.org/detections/
#BravoVirgo

South Pole Observatory Could Solve The Mystery of All Those Fast Radio Bursts

Around the world, efforts are ramping up to try and uncover the mystery of fast radio bursts - extremely powerful, milliseconds-long radio bursts from somewhere out beyond the solar system. We don't know what they are. We don't even know where most of them are coming from, since the majority of sources only emit a burst once and fall silent. But the answer could lie with neutrinos - and that's where a telescope facility at the South Pole called IceCube comes into play.

IceCube uses 5,160 optical modules to detect these tiny particles in the clear, dry, stable atmosphere of the South Pole, with an exceptionally wide field-of-view. When other radio telescopes detect an FRB, the IceCube team can cross-reference the radio data with their own data to check for elevated neutrino activity.

In fact, they have already done so for nearly 30 FRBs, including 17 from FRB 121102, which is an anomalous FRB source that has emitted multiple bursts. The team found no unusual neutrino data, but that is not a null result. It helps narrow down what the FRBs are not.

"We've ruled out gamma-ray bursts and we've strongly constrained the possibility of black holes," Vandenbroucke said.

tak bohužel špatné zprávy :(

Hurricane Damages Giant Radio Telescope—Why It Matters
http://relay.nationalgeographic.com/...o-radio-telescope-damaged-puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-science

Forming Planetesimals in a Dust and Gas Vortex
http://aasnova.org/2017/09/19/forming-planetesimals-in-a-dust-and-gas-vortex/

Planet formation still holds many mysteries for today’s astronomers. One of the biggest unknown is how pebbles and dust clump together to form planetesimals
rather than drifting in towards the star due to its strong gravitational pull. A possible solution is dust traps — in a circumstellar disk, the inward drift
of the pebbles and particles can be stopped by high pressure in the gaseous disk. A dust trap like this would be an ideal place to form planetesimals. The
authors of today’s paper look at a circumstellar disks around AB Aur. They create hydrodynamical simulations of the dust and gas to see if there is a dust
trap with the possible formation of small planets.

Circumstellar disks are the link between bunches of dust around a star and fully formed planetesimals. There are a few types of circumstellar disks —
protoplanetary, transition, and debris. A transition disk is exactly what it sounds like — a transition from protoplanetary to debris, which means that
planets would likely be forming in a transition disk. About 450 light-years away from us, AB Aur hosts an asymmetric transition disk. The unevenness of ¨
the disk could indicate a dust trap or gas vortex. At about 120 AU from the central star, the cold dust emission disk creates an asymmetric ring in the disk.