Saturn is truly the Sci-Fi system. It has a Death Star (Mimas), several UFOs (Pan and Daphnis and presumably Atlas and S/2009 S1), and massive rings

What happens when you try to create a similar shape in Space Engine? Well, the program is not completely happy, but...

Nice JackDole!

Our friends at ESO, in the meantime, used again you-know-what to make another fulldome 4k video of a small trip from Earth to M31:
From Earth to Andromeda
[youtube]HDF5Z1uRsGM[/youtube]
I guess there's muitosabao behind this \o_

Check also "From Earth to Eta Carinae" and other awesome SpaceEngine related videos at https://www.eso.org/public/videos/

Excellent thread and wonderful forum.  As a user of Starry Night Pro Plus 7.5 and member of the Cloudy Nights forum, I am quite impressed with the program and the breadth of the knowledge available here  Until we are able to create our own black hole engines to traverse interstellar space, programs like these are the best we can do to simulate it!

I wanted to make a contribution in terms of an exciting new discovery made in the creation of time crystals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_crystal

A time crystal or space-time crystal is an open system in non-equilibrium with its environment that exhibits time translation symmetry breaking (TTSB). It is impossible for a time crystal to be in equilibrium with its environment. The idea of a time crystal was first put forward by Nobel laureate and MIT professor Frank Wilczek in 2012.[a] Space-time crystals extend the ordinary three-dimensional symmetry seen in crystals to include the fourth dimension of time; a time crystal spontaneously breaks the symmetry of time translation. The crystal's pattern repeats not in space, but in time, which allows for the crystal to be in perpetual motion.[2] Time crystals are closely related to the concepts of zero-point energy and the dynamical Casimir effect.

In 2016 Norman Yao and his colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley, put forward a concrete proposal that would allow time crystals to be created in a laboratory environment.[c] Yao's blueprint was then used by two teams, a group led by Christopher Monroe at the University of Maryland[d] and a group led by Mikhail Lukin at Harvard University,[e] who were both able to successfully create a time crystal. Both experiments were published in the journal Nature in March 2017.[6]

Time crystals are thought to exhibit topological order,[7] an emergent phenomenon, in which nonlocal correlations encoded in the whole wave-function of a system allow for fault tolerance against perturbations, thus allowing quantum states to stabilize against decoherence effects that usually limit their useful lifetime. Preventing decoherence has a wide range of implications: The efficiency of some information theory and quantum thermodynamic tasks can be greatly enhanced when using quantum correlated states. It is also thought that time crystals could also give deeper understanding of the theory of time.[8]

Several new planets around nearby red dwarf stars, including a habitable planet candidate at Luyten's Star (GJ 273) and a four-planet system at GJ 3293.

The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets XLl. A dozen planets around the M dwarfs GJ 3138, GJ 3323, GJ 273, GJ 628, and GJ 3293

https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.05386

Tonight begins the 10 night observing window during which the Event Horizon Telescope will attempt to image and resolve the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.  Here's wishing them the best of luck with the weather and the instrumentation for this historic observation!


Simulated view of what the black hole could look like:

any idea of when we will get the data and the images?

Some time in the next year

Yeah, about a year.  

To give an idea of what's involved with that, each night of observing will involve collecting several petabytes of data for each telescope in the array.  Then these data must all be brought together and run through a supercomputer to actually extract an image using the principles of interferometry.  The black hole is so small that no single telescope can see it, but the wavefronts of light arriving at each telescope arrive a little bit differently, and by correlating the data from multiple telescopes all across the world simultaneously, the image can be constructed as if from a single telescope the size of the Earth.  

Good explanation and demonstration of the technique, using music instead of light.

GJ 1132b - Detection of an atmosphere on a low mass, low temperature (below 1000K) Exoplanet 39 light years away from Earth, considered uninhabitable with 19 times as much solar radiation as Earth receives from the Sun. It was initially discovered (confirmed) on my Birthday, Nov 12th 2015

Semimajor axis of 2.3 million km away from a Red Dwarf M3.5 V star
Orbital period and rotational period of both a 39 hour long year, and day.
Radius is 1.375+/-0.16; Mass is 1.6 times that of Earth
Giving it a range of a nearly rocky interior of around 70% Silicate and 30% Fe or a substantially H2O rich water-world.

Average surface temperature could be around 410 K (137 °C; 278 °F) The side facing the star is probably hotter than Venus. Atmosphere is mostly H2O and or CH4, detected with different infrared wavelengths. Most importantly the very common low mass Red Dwarf that it orbits has not blasted away the atmosphere over billions of years of solar flares. Which might mean thousands of other known Earth-sized exoplanets around Red Dwarfs are likely to have atmospheres too.

Astrophysics submission on arXiv
The Astronomical Journal article submitted 4/6/17

Most importantly the very common low mass Red Dwarf that it orbits has not blasted away the atmosphere over billions of years of solar flares. Which might mean thousands of other known Earth-sized exoplanets around Red Dwarfs are likely to have atmospheres too.

Exciting!  A lot of theoretical studies over the years have suggested that we can't easily exclude M-class stars from harboring habitable planets (indeed they might be the most common) and this observational result seems to weigh in that direction as well.

Mimicking an impact on Earth's early atmosphere yields all 4 RNA bases
seems like that maybe RNA and DNA aren't rare in the universe. maybe DNA is not unique after all

[youtube]ZgFNUQpNCGk[/youtube]

https://www.nasa.gov/specials/ocean-worlds/

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-missions-provide-new-insights-into-ocean-worlds-in-our-solar-system
http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/solar-system/news/a26044/cassini-evidence-hydrothermal-vents-enceladus/
so CO2+2H2=CH4+O2
or CO₂ + 4 H₂ → CH₄ + 2H₂O
sound great for life down in the oceans.
finding hydrogen in the plums.... this is a huge discovery.
europa plums:


enceladus plums:


the europa clipper launches in 2022! and we must have mission to enceladus too!
[youtube]wG-jrJnfI3g[/youtube]
[youtube]-nzaFDkDU7c[/youtube]