Welcome to the 317th Carnival of Space.  Once again, it’s Urban Astronomers turn to scour the Internet for news and articles on space science and astronomy and bring them together into one place.  We’ve had a lot of submissions this week, so let’s cut straight to the chase:

From the Chandra X-ray space telescope’s official blog we have an article titled Too Hot to Swallow: New Chandra results help explain why gas near the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole is so faint in X-rays.

Tranquility Base asks “How would space law would treat asylum requests?” This post tells the true story of Soyuz 38, and asks a hypothetical question inspired by that mission. 

The Space Writer presents “The Sky Connects Us.  She talks about how a love of astronomy unites people around the world.

As we posted earlier on Urban Astronomer, astronomers looking at a dark cloud through ALMA have discovered a record-breaking 500 stellar mass monster protostar.

Next Big Future, the current home base of the Carnival of Space, sends us their usual bonanza with four articles:  First up is a ten thousand person colonization space ship design, proposed with a focus on how the community and living spaces should be designed. People are assigned area with the density of the city of Seattle and standard mixed use living areas. Everyone has 50 square meters of living space. There is agricultural and other green areas.  The second submission is an update on Spiderfab, which has gotten a phase 2 NASA NIAC $500,000 funding. Here are the detailed designs from the phase 1 project.  Third, billionaire Peter Thiel is famous for his early investment in Facebook. He also was a cofounder of Paypal which was then merged with Xcom which was started by Elon Musk. Positron Dynamics has seed funding from Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs. Initial simulations show that as much as 10 micrograms of positrons could be produced each week with a linear accelerator,” says co-founder Ryan Weed, PhD, a physicist and former cryogenic engineer for Jeff Bezos’s space flight company Blue Origin. We could see the beginning of the age of commercial antimatter within five years.  And finally, Six phase 2 NASA NIAC projects were announced. Propellant-less Spacecraft Formation-Flying and Maneuvering with Photonic Laser Thrusters was one of the six projects.

The next featured submitter is Links Through Space.  They invite us to follow their Astronomy club Toutatis in Kustavi, Finland. The Fall/Winter season is open. Read about their experiences as an Astro-club. Watch new astrophotos and animations of the night sky.

Finally, a submission from Astroblog, describing how Ian Musgrave tried to hunt down and photograph the planet Neptune.  With binoculars and a point&click camera.  Good effort!

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