https://www.nasa.gov/...e/goddard/2017/new-study-finds-winking-star-may-be-devouring-wrecked-planets

A team of U.S. astronomers studying the star RZ Piscium has found evidence suggesting its strange, unpredictable
dimming episodes may be caused by vast orbiting clouds of gas and dust, the remains of one or more destroyed planets.

"Our observations show there are massive blobs of dust and gas that occasionally block the star's light and are probably
spiraling into it," said Kristina Punzi, a doctoral student at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York
and lead author of a paper describing the findings. "Although there could be other explanations, we suggest this material
may have been produced by the break-up of massive orbiting bodies near the star."

‘Winking’ Star May Be Devouring Wrecked Planets
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf2oc6nMsn4

Mars: Not as dry as it seems | University of Oxford
http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-12-20-mars-not-dry-it-seems

Two new Oxford University papers have shed light on why there is no life on Mars.

When searching for life, scientists first look for an element key to sustaining it: fresh water.

Although today’s Martian surface is barren, frozen and inhabitable, a trail of evidence points to a once warmer, wetter planet, where water flowed freely.
The conundrum of what happened to this water is long standing and unsolved. However, new research published in Nature suggests that this water is now locked
in the Martian rocks.

Scientists at Oxford’s Department of Earth Sciences, propose that the Martian surface reacted with the water and then absorbed it, increasing the rocks
oxidation in the process, making the planet uninhabitable.

Previous research has suggested that the majority of the water was lost to space as a result of the collapse of the planet’s magnetic field, when it was
either swept away by high intensity solar winds or locked up as sub-surface ice. However, these theories do not explain where all of the water has gone.

Convinced that the planet’s minerology held the answer to this puzzling question, a team led by Dr Jon Wade, NERC Research Fellow in Oxford’s Department
of Earth Sciences, applied modelling methods used to understand the composition of Earth rocks to calculate how much water could be removed from the Martian
surface through reactions with rock. The team assessed the role that rock temperature, sub-surface pressure and general Martian make-up, have on the planetary
surfaces. The results revealed that the basalt rocks on Mars can hold approximately 25 per cent more water than those on Earth, and as a result drew the water
from the Martian surface into its interior.

Powerful New Tool for Looking for Life Beyond Earth | News Releases | The Optical Society
https://www.osa.org/...wsroom/news_releases/2017/powerful_new_tool_for_looking_for_life_beyond_eart/

NASA has developed an innovative new spectroscopy instrument to aid the search for extraterrestrial life. The new instrument is designed to detect compounds and
minerals associated with biological activity more quickly and with greater sensitivity than previous instruments. Although no evidence of life outside of Earth
has yet been found, looking for evidence of present or past life on other planets continues to be an important part of the NASA Planetary Exploration Program.

Researchers at NASA Langley Research Center and the University of Hawaii developed the new instrument, which improves on an analytical technique known as micro
Raman spectroscopy. This technique uses the interaction between laser light and a sample to provide chemical composition information on a microscopic scale. It
can detect organic compounds such as the amino acids found in living things and identify minerals formed by biochemical processes on Earth that might indicate
life on other planets.

‘Cosmic lantern’ could help us further understand the fate of the Universe | UoP News
http://uopnews.port.ac.uk/...smic-lantern-could-help-us-further-understand-the-fate-of-the-universe/

New research has provided a deeper insight into emission line galaxies, used in several ongoing and upcoming surveys,
to help us further understand the composition and fate of the Universe.

A New Twist in the Dark Matter Tale | NASA
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/a-new-twist-in-the-dark-matter-tale.html

An innovative interpretation of X-ray data from a cluster of galaxies could help scientists fulfill a quest they have been on for decades: determining the nature of dark matter.

The finding involves a new explanation for a set of results made with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, ESA’s XMM-Newton and Hitomi, a Japanese-led X-ray telescope. If confirmed
with future observations, this may represent a major step forward in understanding the nature of the mysterious, invisible substance that makes up about 85% of matter in the universe.

The story of this work started in 2014 when a team of astronomers led by Esra Bulbul (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.) found a spike of intensity
at a very specific energy in Chandra and XMM-Newton observations of the hot gas in the Perseus galaxy cluster.

This spike, or emission line, is at an energy of 3.5 kiloelectron volts (keV). The intensity of the 3.5 keV emission line is very difficult if not impossible to explain in terms
of previously observed or predicted features from astronomical objects, and therefore a dark matter origin was suggested. Bulbul and colleagues also reported the existence of the
3.5 keV line in a study of 73 other galaxy clusters using XMM-Newton.

The plot of this dark matter tale thickened when only a week after Bulbul’s team submitted their paper a different group, led by Alexey Boyarsky of Leiden University in the Netherlands,
reported evidence for an emission line at 3.5 keV in XMM-Newton observations of the galaxy M31 and the outskirts of the Perseus cluster, confirming the Bulbul et al. result.

Life may have originated on Earth 4 billion years ago, study of controversial fossils suggests | Science | AAAS
http://www.sciencemag.org/...iginated-earth-4-billion-years-ago-study-controversial-fossils-suggests

The new work indicates these early microorganisms were surprisingly sophisticated, capable of photosynthesis and of using other chemical processes to get energy,
says Birger Rasmussen, a geobiologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, who was not involved with the work. The study “will probably touch off a flurry
of new research into these rocks as other researchers look for data that either support or disprove this new assertion,” adds Alison Olcott Marshall,
a geobiologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence who was not involved in the effort.




3.5 billion-year-old fossil is oldest ever sign of life identified by scientists | The Independent
http://www.independent.co.uk/...-life-identified-fossil-3-billion-years-old-scientists-a8117011.html

Critics had previously argued microfossils were just unusual shapes in the rock

Santa’s workshop could be on snowy moon
https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/santas_workshop_could/

University of Warwick researchers are exploring whether snowy moons over a billion kilometres away from Earth are potentially habitable.

According to Dr David Brown, and colleagues at Warwick’s Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability, life could be supported on moons of ice
and snow with vast oceans under their frozen surfaces, orbiting Jupiter and Saturn.

'Oumuamua update za poslední 2 dny

Astronomers' recent observations of our first-known interstellar visitor reveal that it is very strange indeed.

Right now ‘Oumuamua (or 1I/2017 U1), as it's now known, is some 350 million km (2.3 astronomical units) from Earth, has dimmed to only 27th magnitude, and is receding
at another 5½ million km (15 Earth-Moon distances) each day. But the flurry of observations made weeks ago, when it was closer and brighter, have fueled a second flurry
of activity — writing scientific papers — to detail what we've learned. Here are three highlights that have come to light since S&T's previous update.

Some of the first observations of 1I/2017 U1 showed that it had a slightly reddish color, not unlike a class of red-tinged bodies (called D types) found in the outer
asteroid belt. Careful spectral measurements made by Alan Fitzsimmons (Queens University Belfast) and others using the 4.2-m William Herschel Telescope and the 8.2-m
Very Large Telescope bear out this initial assessment.

‘Oumuamua Update: Red, Tumbling, and Silent - Sky & Telescope
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/solar-system/oumuamua-red-tumbling-and-silent/

No sign of alien life 'so far' on the mystery visitor from space, but we're still looking
https://theconversation.com/...so-far-on-the-mystery-visitor-from-space-but-were-still-looking-89223

All news | Alien object ‘Oumuamua was a natural body visiting from another solar system | News | Queen's University Belfast
http://www.qub.ac.uk/...ctOumuamuawasanaturalbodyvisitingfromanothersolarsystemQueensscientists.html

Star mergers: A new test of gravity, dark energy theories | EurekAlert! Science News
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-12/dbnl-sma121817.php

Observations of neutron star collision challenge some existing theories

https://mcdonaldobservatory.org/news/releases/20171214

https://www.nasa.gov/...eighth-planet-circling-distant-star-discovered-using-artificial-intelligence

The discovery of an eighth planet circling the distant star Kepler-90 by University of Texas at Austin astronomer Andrew Vanderburg
and Google’s Christopher Shallue overturns our solar system’s status as having the highest number of known planets. We're now in a tie.

The newly discovered Kepler-90i — a sizzling hot, rocky planet orbiting its star once every 14.4 days — was found using computers that
“learned” to find planets in data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Kepler finds distant planets beyond the solar system, or exoplanets,
by detecting the minuscule change in brightness when a planet transits (crosses in front of) a star.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uzv-tEa7SI

https://www.nasa.gov/...-release/nasa-hosts-media-teleconference-to-announce-latest-kepler-discovery

No alien 'signals' from cigar-shaped asteroid: researchers
https://phys.org/news/2017-12-alien-cigar-shaped-asteroid.html

No alien signals have been detected from an interstellar, cigar-shaped space rock discovered travelling through our Solar System in October,
researchers listening for evidence of extraterrestrial technology said Thursday.

"No such signals have been detected" by its network of telescopes, the project said Thursday, adding: "the analysis is not yet complete".

Cold Suns, Warm Exoplanets and Methane Blankets
http://www.news.gatech.edu/2017/12/11/cold-suns-warm-exoplanets-and-methane-blankets

NASA astrobiologists from the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a comprehensive new model that shows how planetary chemistry
could make that happen. The model, published in a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience, was based on a likely scenario on Earth three
billion years ago and was actually built around its possible geological and biological chemistry.

The sun produced a quarter less light and heat then, but Earth remained temperate, and methane may have saved our planet from an eon-long
deep-freeze, scientists hypothesize. Had it not, we and most other complex life probably wouldn’t be here today.

The new model combined multiple microbial metabolic processes with volcanic, oceanic and atmospheric activities, which may make it the most
comprehensive of its kind to date. But while studying Earth’s distant past, the Georgia Tech researchers aimed their model light-years away,
wanting it to someday help interpret conditions on recently discovered exoplanets.

The researchers set the model’s parameters broadly so that they could apply not only to our own planet but potentially also to its siblings
with their varying sizes, geologies, and lifeforms.