(Photo: The IceCube Neutrino Observatory (or simply IceCube) is a neutrino telescope constructed at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica.

​Its thousands of sensors are distributed over a cubic kilometre of volume under the Antarctic ice. Similar to its predecessor, the Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA), IceCube consists of spherical optical sensors called Digital Optical Modules (DOMs), each with a photomultiplier tube (PMT) and a single board data acquisition computer which sends digital data to the counting house on the surface above the array. IceCube was completed on 18 December 2010.

DOMs are deployed on "strings" of sixty modules each at depths ranging from 1,450 to 2,450 meters, into holes melted in the ice using a hot water drill. IceCube is designed to look for point sources of neutrinos in the TeV range to explore the highest-energy astrophysical processes.

In November 2013 it was announced that IceCube had detected 28 neutrinos that likely originated outside of the Solar System. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory)

NASA officials are trying to determine whether Earth microbes aboard Curiosity could contaminate the potential Martian seeps from a distance. If the risk is too high, NASA could shift the rover’s course — but that would present a daunting geographical challenge. There is only one obvious path to the ancient geological formations that Curiosity scientists have been yearning to sample for years (see ‘All wet?’).

“We’re very excited to get up to these layers and find the 3-billion-year-old water,” says Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “Not the ten-day-old water.”

The streaks — dubbed recurring slope lineae (RSLs) because they appear, fade away and re­appear seasonally on steep slopes — were first reported1 on Mars five years ago in a handful of places. The total count is now up to 452 possible RSLs. More than half of those are in the enormous equatorial canyon of Valles Marineris, but they also appear at other latitudes and longitudes. “We’re just finding them all over the place,” says David Stillman, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who leads the cataloguing.

http://www.nature.com/news/mars-contamination-fear-could-divert-curiosity-rover-1.20544

http://www.nature.com/news/water-seems-to-flow-freely-on-mars-1.14343
​
http://www.asianage.com/science-health/nasas-curiosity-rover-begins-exploring-new-mars-destinations-733

“Breakthrough Listen recently entered into a partnership with FAST and the National Astronomical Observatory of China,” which built and operates the telescope, said Andrew Siemion, director of the SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, who is also a co-director of Breakthrough Listen.
​
"The dips found by Kepler are real. Something seems to be transiting in front of this star and we still have no idea what it is." confirms German astronomer Michael Hippke. Even if aliens are not involved, Tabby's star remains "the most mysterious star in the universe" as Yale astronomer Tabetha Boyajian described it in a TED talk.

“…SpaceX today released an update on its investigation of the September 1 Falcon 9 launchpad explosion.

Previously, we announced the investigation was focusing on a breach in the cryogenic helium system of the second stage liquid oxygen tank. The root cause of the breach has not yet been confirmed, but attention has continued to narrow to one of the three composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs) inside the LOX tank. Through extensive testing in Texas, SpaceX has shown that it can re-create a COPV failure entirely through helium loading conditions. These conditions are mainly affected by the temperature and pressure of the helium being loaded.

SpaceX’s efforts are now focused on two areas – finding the exact root cause, and developing improved helium loading conditions that allow SpaceX to reliably load Falcon 9. With the advanced state of the investigation, we also plan to resume stage testing in Texas in the coming days, while continuing to focus on completion of the investigation.

The report suggests that they are starting to pin down the very specific temperature and pressure conditions during loading of the helium tank that cause the problem, which also suggests they will soon also be able to adjust their procedures to avoid those conditions. This also suggests that they repeated assurances that they will be able to fly before the end of the year are not unreasonable….”
​
http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/spacex-update-on-sept-1falcon-9-launchpad-explosion/

“First reported in September 2015 by Boyajian, then a postdoc at Yale University, Tabby’s star – more properly called KIC 8462852 – had been flagged by citizen scientists because of its unusual pattern of dimming. These volunteers were looking at stars as part of the internet project Planet Hunters, which allows the public to search for planets around other stars in data taken by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which has been monitoring 150,000 stars for regular dimming that might indicate a planet had passed in front of it.

But while most such dimming by transiting planets is brief, regular and blocks just 1 or 2 percent of the light of the star, Tabby’s star dims for days at a time, by as much as 22 percent, and at irregular intervals.

While Boyajian speculated in her 2015 paper that the irregular dimming might be explained by a swarm of comets breaking up as it approached the star, subsequent observations show the star, which is located about 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus, is far more irregular than a comet swarm would produce. In fact, it seems to have been dimming at a steady rate for the past century.

Speculation eventually arose that the dimming was caused by a Dyson structure: a massive orbiting array of solar collectors that physicist Freeman Dyson once proposed would be a natural thing for a civilization to build as it needed more and more energy to power itself. Theoretically, such a structure could completely surround the star – what he termed a Dyson sphere – and capture nearly all the star’s energy….”

http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/aggressive-seti-observations-of-tabbys-star-upcoming/
________
If intelligent aliens actually do live around Tabby's star, astronomers are determined to find them.

The Breakthrough Listen initiative, which will spend $100 million over the next 10 years to hunt for signals possibly produced by alien civilizations, is set to begin studying Tabby's star with the 330-foot-wide (100 meters) Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, project team members announced Tuesday (Oct. 25).
​
http://www.space.com/34505-alien-megastructure-star-seti-search.html

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC- Space X Plans to Send People to the Moon in 2018

A direct localization of a fast radio burst and its host fast radio bursts are astronomical radio flashes of unknown physical nature with durations of milliseconds. Their dispersive arrival times suggest an extragalactic origin and imply radio luminosities that are orders of magnitude larger than those of all known short-duration radio transients. So far all fast radio bursts have been detected with large single-dish telescopes with arcminute (a unit of angular distance equal to 160 of one degree, 1/3600 of a degree) localizations, and attempts to identify their counterparts (source or host galaxy) have relied on the contemporaneous variability of field sources or the presence of peculiar field stars or galaxies. 

These attempts have not resulted in an unambiguous association with a host or multi-wavelength counterpart. Here we report the subarcsecond (less than an arcsecond which is a unit of angular distance equal to a 160th of a arcminute 1/3600 of a minute) localization of the fast radio burst FRB 121102, the only known repeating burst source, using high-time-resolution radio interferometric observations that directly image the bursts. Our precise localization reveals that FRB 121102 originates within 100 milliarcseconds of a faint 180-microJansky persistent radio source with a continuum spectrum that is consistent with nonthermal emission, and a faint (twenty-fifth magnitude) optical counterpart. The flux density of the persistent radio source varies by around ten per cent on day timescales, and very long baseline radio interferometry yields an angular size of less than 1.7 milliarcseconds.

Our observations are inconsistent with the fast radio burst having a Galactic origin or its source being located within a prominent star-forming galaxy. Instead, the source appears to be co-located with a low-luminosity active galactic nucleus or a previously unknown type of extragalactic source. Localization and identification of a host or counterpart has been essential to understanding the origins and physics of other kinds of transient events, including gamma-ray bursts and tidal disruption events. However, if other fast radio bursts have similarly faint radio and optical counterparts, our findings imply that direct subarcsecond localizations may be the only way to provide reliable associations.

Confounding Transient Event 2 Billion Light Years Away. Shami Chatterjee, Cornell University. @shamichatterjee

​http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v541/n7635/full/nature20797.html
​Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts Traced to Dwarf Galaxy in the Auriga Constellation

Cool image time! The image on the right, reduced to show here, provides an overall summary of what astronomers know about the atmospheres of many gas giant exoplanets that also orbit very close to their suns and are tidally locked. The view is of the planet hemisphere facing away from the star, which is also where most of the clouds are thought to be. These results come from Kepler data combined with computer modeling, and show what scientists thinks happens with different cloud compositions at different temperatures.
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http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/the-clouds-of-hot-jupiter-exoplanets/

“Hot Jupiters are exoplanets that orbit their stars so tightly that their temperatures are extremely high, reaching over 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit (1600 Kelvin). They are also tidally locked, so one side of the planet always faces the sun and the other is in permanent darkness. Research suggests that the "dayside" is largely free of clouds, while the "nightside" is heavily clouded.
This illustration represents how hot Jupiters of different temperatures and different cloud compositions might appear to a person flying over the dayside of these planets on a spaceship, based on computer modeling.

Cooler planets are entirely cloudy, whereas hotter planets have morning clouds only. Clouds of different composition have different colors, whereas the clear sky is bluer than on Earth. For the hottest planets, the atmosphere is hot enough on the evening side to glow like a charcoal.

Figure 1 shows an approximation of what various hot Jupiters might look like based on a combination of computer modeling and data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. From left to right it shows: sodium sulfide clouds (1000 to 1200 Kelvin), manganese sulfide clouds (1200 to 1600 Kelvin), magnesium silicate clouds (1600 to 1800 Kelvin), magnesium silicate and aluminum oxide clouds (1800 Kelvin) and clouds composed of magnesium silicate, aluminum oxide, iron and calcium titanate (1900 to 2200 Kelvin).”
​
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA21074

Hotel Mars: Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements. by Haym Benaroya, with David Livingston, SpaceShow.com
​
Designing a habitat for the lunar surface? You will need to know more than structural engineering. There are the effects of meteoroids, radiation, and low gravity. Then there are the psychological and psychosocial aspects of living in close quarters, in a dangerous environment, far away from home. All these must be considered when the habitat is sized, materials specified, and structure designed.

This book provides an overview of various concepts for lunar habitats and structural designs and characterizes the lunar environment - the technical and the nontechnical. The designs take into consideration psychological comfort, structural strength against seismic and thermal activity, as well as internal pressurization and 1/6 g. Also discussed are micrometeoroid modeling, risk and redundancy as well as probability and reliability, with an introduction to analytical tools that can be useful in modeling uncertainties.

​

Einstein’s greatest theory has aced another test. Two stars are speeding around the big black hole at the Milky Way’s core in just the way his general theory of relativity predicted.

“It’s the first time that general relativity is really tested around a supermassive black hole,” says Aurélien Hees at the University of California, Los Angeles.
These stars were first discovered in the 1990s, when astronomers began tracking their movements. By observing their orbits for 19 years, Hees and his colleagues found that general relativity describes the stars’ paths perfectly. The stars show no sign of a hypothetical fifth force that would cause a deviation from the theory’s predictions.

A fifth force would operate in addition to the four fundamental forces known to physicists:  gravity, which general relativity describes; electromagnetism; the strong nuclear force; and the weak nuclear force.

Black hole’s pull
​
General relativity manifests itself most dramatically near massive objects. In our solar system, it particularly affects Mercury, the sun’s innermost planet, perturbing its path in ways that astronomers once attributed to the gravitational pull of an unseen world inside Mercury’s orbit.Ordinary black holes, such as Cygnus X-1 in the constellation of the same name, are more massive than the sun, but stars that orbit them don’t provide useful tests of general relativity. This is partly because they lose gas to the black hole, which leads to their paths being altered in ways that have nothing to do with Einstein’s theory.

In contrast, the stars that astronomers have seen venturing near the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s centre provide a much cleaner test because they don’t come close enough to lose gas to the black hole. Named Sagittarius A*, this black hole is 4 million times as massive as the sun and 27,000 light years from Earth.

Just as every planet in the solar system orbits the sun, every star in the galaxy orbits this supermassive black hole. The sun does so once every 230 million years – such a long time that it once seemed hopeless to track a star’s full orbit.

Astonishingly, though, astronomers reported in 2000 that they had begun to see stars near the black hole curve around it in response to its gravity. Now observers have tested general relativity by tracking two of those stars over complete orbits: S0-2, which takes 16 years to revolve, and S0-38, which takes 19 years.

Prodding relativity“I think it’s great. This is opening up a whole new realm of testing general relativity in a very unique regime: a strong-field regime near a supermassive black hole,” says Clifford Will at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

He says that next year will offer a more stringent test of Einstein’s theory. S0-2, which follows an extremely elliptical orbit, will skirt just 111 astronomical units from the black hole – less than four times the distance between the sun and Neptune – and modern technology will yield more accurate observations.

“If there is a deviation from general relativity, that’s when we will be the most sensitive to detect such a deviation,” Hees says.

Moreover, gargantuan 30-metre telescopes planned for the future should be able to spot stars that venture even closer to the black hole, providing an even greater test of Einstein’s theory.

Journal references:  Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.211101; and arxiv.org/abs/1705.10792
Read more: General relativity at 100: Einstein’s unfinished masterpiece

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2133830-general-relativity-passes-test-at-milky-ways-central-black-hole/#ixzz617tvrMNs

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2133830-general-relativity-passes-test-at-milky-ways-central-black-hole/#ixzz617tQnehU

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2133830-general-relativity-passes-test-at-milky-ways-central-black-hole/#ixzz617tJcz34
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2133830-general-relativity-passes-test-at-milky-ways-central-black-hole/#ixzz617tDjpyd