VIRGO: Measured in the time domain? Or how?

https://archive.stsci.edu/tess/

Snellen - Exoplanets and the search for extraterrestrial life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=ZNkhILRp354

VIRGO: obavam se ze to je ale spatne - minimalne ten lunochod je moc malej. Ve skutecnosti ma prumer "talire" cca 2m.

Recipe for a comet | Max Planck Society
https://www.mpg.de/11813538/chemical-elements-rosetta-comet-67p?c=2249

Rearchers analyse which chemical elements make up comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

The dust that comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko emits into space consists to about one half of organic molecules.
The dust also belongs to the most pristine and carbon-rich material known in our solar system; it has hardly
changed since its birth. These are the results of the COSIMA team, an instrument onboard the Rosetta spacecraft,
which investigated the comet. In their current study, the involved researchers including scientists from the Max
Planck Institute for Solar System Research analyze as comprehensively as never before, what chemical elements
constitute cometary dust.

The Mysterious Star MWC349su201744 | www.cfa.harvard.edu/
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/su201744

Molecular clouds in interstellar space can sometimes produce natural masers (the radio wavelength analogs of lasers) that shine with
bright, narrow beams of radiation. Regions of active star formation generate some of the most spectacular such masers -- in one case
radiating as much energy in a single spectral line as does our Sun in its entire visible spectrum. In these sources, the maser
radiation comes from molecules like water or OH that are excited by collisions and the radiation environment around the young stars.

Giant Black Hole Pair Photobombs Andromeda Galaxy | NASA
https://www.nasa.gov/...on_pages/chandra/news/giant-black-hole-pair-photobombs-andromeda-galaxy.html

It seems like even black holes can’t resist the temptation to insert themselves unannounced into photographs. A cosmic photobomb found as a background
object in images of the nearby Andromeda galaxy has revealed what could be the most tightly coupled pair of supermassive black holes ever seen.

Astronomers made this remarkable discovery using X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical data from ground-based telescopes, Gemini-
North in Hawaii and the Caltech’s Palomar Transient Factory in California.

This unusual source, called LGGS J004527.30+413254.3 (J0045+41 for short), was seen in optical and X-ray images of Andromeda, also known as M31. Until
recently, scientists thought J0045+41 was an object within M31, a large spiral galaxy located relatively nearby at a distance of about 2.5 million light
years from Earth. The new data, however, revealed that J0045+41 was actually at a much greater distance, around 2.6 billion light years from Earth.

“We were looking for a special type of star in M31 and thought we had found one,” said Trevor Dorn-Wallenstein of the University of Washington in Seattle,
WA, who led the paper describing this discovery. “We were surprised and excited to find something far stranger!”

Even more intriguing than the large distance of J0045+41 is that it likely contains a pair of giant black holes in close orbit around each other.
The estimated total mass for these two supermassive black holes is about two hundred million times the mass of our Sun.

Previously, a different team of astronomers had seen periodic variations in the optical light from J0045+41, and, believing it to be a member of M31,
classified it as a pair of stars that orbited around each other about once every 80 days.

Hydrothermal vent experiments bring Enceladus to Earth - Astrobiology Magazine
https://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/hydrothermal-vent-experiments-bring-enceladus-earth/

Laboratory experiments on Earth can now simulate the conditions under which life might emerge on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, as well as other icy alien worlds,
according to new research published in the September 2017 issue of the journal Astrobiology.

Since there is life virtually wherever there is water on Earth, researchers looking for alien life often focus on planets in the habitable zones of stars,
which are the regions around stars where it is warm enough for worlds to possess water on their surfaces. However, in the past few decades, scientists have
increasingly found evidence for oceans – and, potentially, life – hidden under the icy crusts of places such as Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto,
and Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Titan.

On Earth, life is often thought to have originated near hydrothermal vents, which include hot springs on land, as well as fissures near undersea volcanoes.
Much research has suggested that icy moons might also host active hydrothermal vents on their ocean floors. Enceladus is of particular interest because data
from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft suggests there is activity within its ocean involving temperatures exceeding 90 degrees Celsius (194 degrees Fahrenheit),
which in turn hints at geothermal heating by hydrothermal vents.

Scientists reduce the chances of life on exoplanets in so-called habitable zones around red stars
https://www.princeton.edu/...sts-reduce-chances-life-exoplanets-so-called-habitable-zones-around-red

Is there life beyond Earth in the cosmos? Astronomers looking for signs have found that our Milky Way galaxy teems with exoplanets, some with conditions that could be right
for extraterrestrial life. Such worlds orbit stars in so-called “habitable zones,” regions where planets could hold liquid water that is necessary for life as we know it.

However, the question of habitability is highly complex. Researchers led by space physicist Chuanfei Dong of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics
Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University have recently raised doubts about water on — and thus potential habitability of — frequently cited exoplanets that orbit red dwarfs,
the most common stars in the Milky Way.

In two papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the scientists develop models showing that the stellar wind — the constant outpouring of charged particles that sweep out
into space — could severely deplete the atmosphere of such planets over hundreds of millions of years, rendering them unable to host surface-based life as we know it.

“Traditional definition and climate models of the habitable zone consider only the surface temperature,” Dong said. “But the stellar wind can significantly contribute to
the long-term erosion and atmospheric loss of many exoplanets, so the climate models tell only part of the story.”

To broaden the picture, the first paper looks at the timescale of atmospheric retention on Proxima Centauri b (PCb), which orbits the nearest star to our solar system,
some four light years away. The second paper questions how long oceans could survive on “water worlds” — planets thought to have seas that could be hundreds of miles deep.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2017/dance-preserves-oceans

Heat generated by the gravitational pull of moons formed from massive collisions could extend the lifetimes of liquid water oceans beneath the surface
of large icy worlds in our outer solar system, according to new NASA research. This greatly expands the number of locations where extraterrestrial life
might be found, since liquid water is necessary to support known forms of life and astronomers estimate there are dozens of these worlds.

Are Spinning Black Holes Louder?
http://aasnova.org/2017/11/29/are-spinning-black-holes-louder/

Some distant active galaxies are louder in radio wavelengths than others. A new study explores whether
this difference could be due to how quickly the supermassive black holes at their centers are spinning.

First Finding of China's DAMPE May Shed Light on Dark Matter Research---Chinese Academy of Sciences
http://english.cas.cn/head/201711/t20171120_186326.shtml

The DArk Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE, also known as Wukong) mission published its first scientific results on Nov. 30 in Nature,
presenting the precise measurement of cosmic ray electron flux, especially a spectral break at ~0.9 TeV. The data may shed light on
the annihilation or decay of particle dark matter.

DAMPE is a collaboration of more than a hundred scientists, technicians and students at nine institutes in China, Switzerland and Italy,
under the leadership of the Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The DAMPE mission is funded by
the strategic priority science and technology projects in space science of CAS.

DAMPE, China’s first astronomical satellite, was launched from China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center into sun-synchronous orbit on Dec.
17th, 2015. At an altitude of about 500 km, DAMPE has been collecting data since a week after its launch.

In its first 530 days of science operation through June 8 of this year, DAMPE has detected 1.5 million cosmic ray electrons and positrons
above 25 GeV. The electron and positron data are characterized by unprecedentedly high energy res and low particle background contamination.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/wasp-18b-has-smothering-stratosphere-without-water

A NASA-led team has found evidence that the oversized planet WASP-18b is wrapped in a smothering stratosphere loaded with carbon monoxide
and devoid of water. The findings come from a new analysis of observations made by the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes.

The formation of a stratosphere layer in a planet’s atmosphere is attributed to “sunscreen”-like molecules, which absorb UV and visible
radiation coming from the star and then release that energy as heat. The new study suggests that the “hot Jupiter” WASP-18b, a massive
planet that orbits very close to its host star, has an unusual composition, and the formation of this world might have been quite
different from that of Jupiter as well as gas giants in other planetary systems.