Los Alamos researchers and supercomputers help interpret the latest LIGO findings
http://www.lanl.gov/discover/news-release-archive/2017/October/1017-ligo-findings.php

The theorists tweaked their models and, to their delight, the new LIGO data confirmed that heavy elements beyond iron were formed by
the r-process (rapid process) in the neutron-star merger. The gravitational wave observation was having a major impact on theory.

They also quickly noticed that, within seconds of the time of the gravitational waves, the Fermi spacecraft reported a burst of gamma
rays from the same part of the sky. This is the first time that a gravitational wave source has been detected in any other way. It
confirms Einstein’s prediction that gravitational waves travel at the same speed as gamma rays: the speed of light.

https://www.facebook.com/NASAGoddard/videos/10156696111280898/

Gravity has been making waves - literally. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the first direct detection of gravitational waves
back in 2015. On Monday, October 16, astronomers announced another huge advance in the field of gravitational waves - for the first time,
we’ve observed light and gravitational waves from the same source, showing exactly where gravitational waves originated.

This Facebook Live goes deep inside this new era of astronomy. We’ll discuss how this event was detected by our NASA Fermi Gamma-ray Space
Telescope, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the European Gravitational
Observatory’s Virgo and review how many precious metals on Earth, like gold, are remnants of these collisions of neutron stars from millions
of light-years away.

Crews battle brush fire near Mount Wilson Observatory - Story | KTTV
http://www.foxla.com/news/local-news/crews-battle-brush-fire-near-mount-wilson

Firefighters worked Tuesday to extinguish a fire that scorched about 26 acres of brush after it broke out
before dawn near the Mount Wilson Observatory in the Angeles National Forest northeast of Los Angeles.

No injuries were reported and no structures have been threatened, the department reported. Deputies from
the sheriff's Crescenta Valley Station helped evacuate Mount Wilson Observatory employees.

Study shows how water could have flowed on ‘cold and icy’ ancient Mars | News from Brown
http://news.brown.edu/articles/2017/10/icyhighlands

Research by planetary scientists at Brown University finds that periodic melting of ice sheets on a cold
early Mars would have created enough water to carve the ancient valleys and lakebeds seen on the planet today.

Young star provides a glimpse of how planets are made | Cosmos
https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/young-star-provides-a-glimpse-of-how-planets-are-made

High powered telescopes aimed at a distant young hot star called V1247 Orionis have yielded
some intriguing clues to one of astronomy’s most enduring mysteries: how planets form.

The star – which is being monitored by the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA) telescope
in Chile for – can be found in the background of Orion’s Belt. Like most young, hot stars,
it is surrounded by a large disc of gas and dust.

Astronomers believe that these discs are intimately bound up with the process of planet formation,
but the mechanism is poorly understood.

Dust existing at the outer edges of the disc is likely to drift away into space, while that in
the inner regions has been shown to be subjected to drag from the surrounding gas. As a result,
it tends to fall inwards into the star in a process known as “radial drift”.

Now, however, a team led by Stefan Kraus from the University of Exeter in the UK has analysed data
from ALMA and identified a large anomaly in the make-up of the disc.

Is S0-2 a Binary Star?
http://aasnova.org/2017/10/17/is-s0-2-a-binary-star/

The most exciting discoveries in astronomy all have something in common: they let us marvel at the fact that nature obeys laws of physics.
The star S0-2 is one of these exciting discoveries. S0-2 (also known as S2) is a fast-moving star that has been observed to follow a full
elliptical, 16-year orbit around the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, precisely according to Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.
Serving as a test-particle probe of the gravitational potential, S0-2 provides some of the best constraints on the black hole’s mass and
distance yet. S0-2 is the brightest of the S-stars, a group of young main-sequence stars concentrated within the inner 1” (0.13 ly) of
the nuclear star cluster.

The next time S0-2 reaches its closest approach to the black hole, in 2018, there will exist a unique opportunity to detect a deviation from
Keplerian motion — namely the relativistic redshift of S0-2’s radial (line-of-sight) velocity — in a direct measurement. In anticipation of
this event, the authors of today’s paper investigate possible consequences of S0-2 being not a single star, but a spectroscopic binary, which
would complicate this measurement.

Microbes leave "fingerprints" on Martian rocks
http://medienportal.univie.ac.at/...ailansicht/artikel/microbes-leave-fingerprints-on-martian-rocks/

Scientists around Tetyana Milojevic from the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Vienna are in search of unique biosignatures,
which are left on synthetic extraterrestrial minerals by microbial activity. The biochemist and astrobiologist investigates these
signatures at her own miniaturized "Mars farm" where she can observe interactions between the archaeon Metallosphaera sedula and Mars-
like rocks. These microbes are capable of oxidizing and integrating metals into their metabolism. The original research was currently
published in the journal "Frontiers in Microbiology".

VIRGO: tohle je docela velký, podle všeho:
Astronomers Strike Gravitational Gold In Colliding Neutron Stars - Slashdot
https://science.slashdot.org/...206/astronomers-strike-gravitational-gold-in-colliding-neutron-stars
A New Rosetta Stone for Astronomy - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/astronomers-have-seen-the-light/542907/

...ale nebyla o tom nějaká letmá zmínka už v tom srpnu?

VIRGO:

Neutron-Star Merger Detected By Many Eyes and Ears
http://aasnova.org/2017/10/16/neutron-star-merger-detected-by-many-eyes-and-ears/

The Remarkable Jet of the Quasar 4C+19.44su201739 | www.cfa.harvard.edu/
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/su201739

Quasars are galaxies with massive black holes at their cores. So much energy is being radiated from near the nucleus of a quasar
that it is much brighter than the rest of the entire galaxy. Much of that radiation is at radio wavelengths, produced by electrons
ejected from the core at speeds very close to that of light, often in narrow, bipolar jets that are hundreds of thousands of light-
years long. The fast-moving charged particles can also scatter photons of light, kicking them up in energy into the X-ray range.
Even after more than two decades of study, however, there is still no clear conclusion as to the physical mechanism actually
responsible for the X-ray emission. In more powerful quasars, it does appear that this scattering process dominates. In lower power
jets, however, the emission characteristics suggest that the X-ray emission is dominated by magnetic field effects, not scattering.

A 3D step towards sorting out the Gamma-Ray Bursts zoo — English
http://www.inaf.it/en/inaf-news/gold-grb

A powerful tool for characterizing and classifying gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) to allow their use as tracers of the expansion
history of the universe has recently been presented by an international team of researchers led by Dr. Maria Dainotti

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCMyfrOKnU0

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/...dickinson/asteroid-2012-tc4-set-to-zip-past-the-earth-on-thursday/

A small space rock designated 2012 TC4 will pass 31,180 miles (50,180 kilometers from the Earth over the southern Pacific Ocean on Thursday, October 12,
2017 at 1:42 a.m. EDT / 5:42 Universal Time (UT). Moving at 7.6 kilometers per second relative to the Earth at closest approach, this house-sized rock is
about 13 meters in diameter, a little smaller than the 20-meter meteor which exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia on February 15, 2013.



http://www.astrowatch.net/2017/10/close-approach-of-asteroid-2012-tc4_10.html

Calculations revealed by JPL in July 2017 indicated that 2012 TC4 could pass as close as 4,200 miles (6,800 kilometers). These results were based on only
seven days of tracking of this asteroid after it was discovered. However, new observations of this space rock conducted at the European Southern Observatory
(ESO) by Olivier Hainaut, Detlef Koschny and Marco Micheli of the European Space Agency (ESA) in July and August 2017, show different estimates.

“The new calculations indicate that TC4 will fly safely past our planet on Oct. 12, at a distance of about 43,500 kilometers (27,000 miles) above the surface,
or about one-eighth of the distance to the Moon,” JPL informed. Therefore, new data provided by the latest observational campaign exclude the possibility of
2012 TC4 hitting our planet. Harris underlines that even if this asteroid crashed into Earth it would not cause any major damage.

“It is small enough (about the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor) that even if it impacted it would be unlikely to cause any major damage. Recall that the Chelyabinsk
meteor only caused substantial damage and injuries because it chanced to hit over a populated area. Over most of the Earth's area, it would have been completely
harmless,” Harris said.

https://www.virtualtelescope.eu/webtv/

http://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=139842



http://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=139841