* Astronomy

In the 18th January, 1916, a 611 gram ordinary chondrite (L6) meteorite fell through the roof of a house. near the village of Baxter in Stone County, Missouri. Latitude: 36° 45'N, Longitude: 93° 30'W

Title: Solar astrometry: the status of art in 2011 Authors: Costantino Sigismondi Solar astrometry deals with the accurate measurement of the solar diameter, and in general with the measurement of the shape of the Sun. During the last decades several techniques have been developed to monitor the...

Title: Detection of the Buried AGN in NGC 6240 with the Infrared Spectrograph on the Spitzer Space Telescope Authors: L. Armus, J. Bernard-Salas, H.W.W. Spoon, J.A. Marshall, V. Charmandaris, S.J.U. Higdon, V. Desai, L. Hao, H.I. Teplitz, D. Devost, B.R. Brandl, B.T. Soifer, J.R. Ho...

Title: Possible explanations of the Maunder minimum from a flux transport dynamo model Authors: Bidya Binay Karak, Arnab Rai Choudhuri We propose that at the beginning of the Maunder minimum the poloidal field or amplitude of meridional circulation or both fell abruptly to low values. With this p...

Warped stars feed black holes to fatten them up Why are supermassive black holes so, well, supermassive? It has long been a mystery how enough matter can reach these cosmic gluttons to swell them to such large sizes. Now it seems the answer could be connected to a starry disc at the heart of the Andromed...

Title: The surface age of Sputnik Planum, Pluto, must be less than 10 million years Author: David E. Trilling Data from the New Horizons mission to Pluto show no craters on Sputnik Planum down to the detection limit (2 km for low resolution data, 625 m for high resolution data). The number of small Kuip...

Title: Time series analysis of long-term photometry of BM Canum Venaticorum Author: L. Siltala, L. Jetsu, T. Hackman, G. W. Henry, L. Immonen, P. Kajatkari, J. Lankinen, J. Lehtinen, S. Monira, S. Nikbakhsh, A. Viitanen, J. Viuho, T. Willamo We study a quarter of a century of standard Johnson diffe...

ATel 8553: ASASSN-16ae: Discovery of an Extreme (Delta V ~ 10 mag) Flare on an Ultracool Dwarf Star

China launches Belarusian telecom satellite A Long March-3B carrier rocket is launched with a Belarusian telecom satellite in Xichang of southwest China's Sichuan Province. Read more

In 1982, an Australian spy plane snapped photographs of a miniature space shuttle being fished out of the Indian Ocean by a Soviet ship. The craft turned out to be a BOR-4, which the Russians were testing as part of their short-lived space shuttle programme. So intrigued was NASA by the photographs th...

ATel 8551: VVV-NOV-007: the seventh Galactic nova candidate discovered by the VVV Survey

Orbital elements: 2016 AN165 Earth MOID = 0.0003 AU Epoch 2016 Jan. 13.0 TT = JDT 2457400.5 MPC M 42.86183 (2000.0) P Q n 0.76715509 Peri. 281.47508 +0.81497214 -0.55776922 a 1.1818089 Node 112.61197 +0.57554098 +0.74739547 e 0.3357412 Incl. 9.80511 +0.06762390 +0.36096192 P 1.28 H 27.6...

ATel 8542: ASASSN-16aj: Discovery of A Probable Supernova in NGC 1562 Mag 17.0V

NGC 1562 (also 2MASX J04214762-1545198 and PGC 14956) is a magnitude +15.3 face-on barred spiral or lenticular galaxy located 424 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus. The galaxy was discovered by American astronomer Francis Preserved Leavenworth using a 66.04 cm (26 inch) A...

ATel 8545: Discovery and Classification of HFF15Cru, a Type Ia Supernova in Abell 370