The first temple perhaps

Smithsonian magazine has a recent article  (2008) on Gobekli Tepe, which is 300 miles from Catalhoyuk and is reliably dated to 11,000 years ago.  One paragraph reads:


Unlike the stark plateaus nearby, Gobekli Tepe (the name means "belly hill" in Turkish) has a gently rounded top that rises 50 feet above the surrounding landscape. To Schmidt's eye, the shape stood out. "Only man could have created something like this," he says. "It was clear right away this was a gigantic Stone Age site." The broken pieces of limestone that earlier surveyors had mistaken for gravestones suddenly took on a different meaning.


What the article does not say, perhaps because it is a commonplace in the literature, is that "Belly Hill" may be a reproduction of a pregnant woman's shape.  Which gives rise to rumination about a few of the motifs in monumental architecture. assuming that the present nomenclature has some relation to older names. Which may be a stretch.

The resistance to the idea the religion preceded argriculture, is not mentioned, but is a definite aspect of the history of interpreting these ruins.  My not original (I am sure) take on this is that the resistance was because if religion predated domesticated plants, then you could not so easily argue that man's manifestations of religious beliefs were a secondary development, and not related to man's fundamental ature.  Possibly their current attitude that the symbolism is too old to reliably interpret is another stab at avoiding that conclusion.

Nothing though can diminish the amazement at these discoveries.

470 million years ago

A meteorite unlike any others found 

"Baby Alien Worlds"

The full article is at space.com

"Baby alien worlds are indeed likely slicing gaps in the disk of dust and gas swirling around the young star HL Tauri — a finding that could help reshape scientists' current understanding of how planets form.
Astronomers found that some of the rings in the disk's gaseous component line up with rings in the dust, further supporting the theory that exoplanets are coalescing there — and suggesting that alien worlds may form much more quickly than scientists had thought.
"To our surprise, these gaps in the gas overlap with dust gaps," lead author Hsi-Wei Yen, a researcher at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, said in a statement. "This supports the idea that the gaps are the footprints left by baby planets. Our results indicate that planets start to form much earlier than we expected."


Baby?
Alien?

Diamond Planets might exist and might have been the origin of life

Excerpted from:

cit http://earthsky.org/space/universes-first-life-on-diamond-planets

Earth, Mars, and Venus are composed mostly of silicate rocks, with an iron core and a thin veneer of water and life. But since 2005, astronomers have been talking about a theoretical kind of planet called a carbon planet, which astronomers also call a diamond planet. The discussion about them ramped up when Jupiter wasproposed in 2004 to have formed a carbon-rich core. On June 7, 2016, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Boston announced a new study suggesting that the first potentially habitable worlds to form might have been carbon planets. That is, they might have consisted mostly of graphite, carbides, and diamond.

.......

Artist’s concept of a hypothetical carbon planet, also called a diamond planet by astronomers. Images via Christine Pulliam (CfA)/ NASA/ SDO.

Mashian and her PhD thesis advisor Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics examined a particular class of ancient stars known as carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars, or CEMP stars. These stars contain only one hundred-thousandth as much iron as our sun.

The astronomers explained in their statement that – because the universe was born with mostly hydrogen and helium, with heavier elements born inside stars and spread throughout space via supernova explosions – they know the metal-poor stars in their study were born early in the history of our universe.

That is, they were born before the interstellar space had been widely seeded with heavy elements. Loeb explained:

These stars are fossils from the young universe. By studying them, we can look at how planets, and possibly life in the universe, got started.

The astronomers said that, although lacking in iron and other heavy elements compared to our sun, the ancient CEMP stars they studied were observed to have more carbon than would be expected given their age. They said:

This relative abundance would influence planet formation as fluffy carbon dust grains clump together to form tar-black worlds.

Mashian and Loeb propose that a dedicated search for planets around CEMP stars, in order to find diamond planets. They note that – from a distance, these carbon planets would be difficult to tell apart from silicate-based Earth-like worlds. Their masses and physical sizes would be similar (see the illustration below).

Astronomers would have to examine their atmospheres for signs of their true nature, they explained, since gases like carbon monoxide and methane would envelop these unusual worlds.

Mashian and Loeb said the search might be accomplished using the transit technique, that is, by looking for the tiny dip in the light of a distant star as an unknown planet passes in front of it. A large fraction of the known exoplanets, or planets orbiting other suns, were found via this technique. 

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Size comparison of differently composed planets, via NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

...

New observations of black hole growth

At
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/654955/?sc=swhn
a previously unobserved process of black hole growth
reported in

Nature, June 2016

Newswise — An international team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has witnessed a never-before-seen cosmic weather event – a cluster of towering intergalactic gas clouds raining in on the supermassive black hole at the center of an elliptical galaxy one billion light-years from Earth.

The new ALMA observations are the first direct evidence that cold dense clouds can coalesce out of hot intergalactic gas and plunge into the heart of a galaxy to feed its central supermassive black hole. They also reshape astronomers’ views on how supermassive black holes feed through a process known as accretion.

Previously, astronomers believed that, in the largest galaxies, supermassive black holes fed on a slow and steady diet of hot ionized gas from the galaxy’s halo. The new ALMA observations show that, when the intergalactic weather conditions are right, black holes can also gorge on a clumpy, chaotic downpour of giant, very cold clouds of molecular gas.

"This so-called cold, chaotic accretion has been a major theoretical prediction in recent years, but this is one of the first unambiguous pieces of observational evidence for a chaotic, cold 'rain' feeding a supermassive black hole," said Grant Tremblay, an astronomer with Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and lead author on a paper appearing in the journal Nature. "It's exciting to think we might actually be observing this galaxy-spanning 'rainstorm' feeding a black hole whose mass is about 300 million times that of our Sun."

Tremblay and his team used ALMA to peer into a phenomenally bright cluster of about 50 galaxies, collectively known as Abell 2597. At its core is a singular massive elliptical galaxy, pragmatically dubbed the Abell 2597 Brightest Cluster Galaxy. Suffusing the space between these galaxies is a diffuse atmosphere of hot, ionized plasma, which was previously observed with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

"This very, very hot gas can quickly cool, condense, and precipitate in much the same way that warm, humid air in Earth's atmosphere can spawn rain clouds and precipitation," Tremblay said. "The newly condensed clouds then rain in on the galaxy, fueling star formation and feeding its supermassive black hole."

Near the center of this galaxy, the researchers discovered this exact scenario: three massive clumps of cold gas careening toward the supermassive black hole in the galaxy’s core at 300 kilometers per second (roughly 670,000 miles per hour). Each cloud contains as much material as a million Suns and is tens of light-years across.

Normally, objects on that scale would be difficult to distinguish at these cosmic distances, even with ALMA’s amazing resolution.

They were revealed, however, by the billion light-year-long "shadows" they cast toward Earth. These shadows, known as absorption features, were formed by the in-falling gas clouds blocking out a portion of the bright background millimeter-wavelength light, which is emitted by electrons spiraling around magnetic fields very near the central supermassive black hole.

Additional data from the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array indicate that the gas clouds observed by ALMA are approximately 300 light-years from the central black hole, essentially teetering on the edge of being devoured, in astronomical terms.

While ALMA was only able to detect three of these clouds, the astronomers speculate that there may be thousands like them in the vicinity, setting up the black hole for a continued downpour that could fuel its activity well into the future.

The astronomers now plan to use ALMA in a broader search for these "rainstorms" in other galaxies to determine if such cosmic weather is as common as current theory suggests it to be.

Where are the exomoons

A most interesting article on how our moon may have made our planet hospitable to life and thus a clue to whether there is life elsewhere in the universe. We excerpt:


...First, there’s the stark reality that life on Earth may not have happened at all without the starring role played by our own moon.

The Earth’s axis is tilted by 23.5 degrees relative to its motion around the sun. This tilt gives us seasons, and because this tilt is relatively small, seasons on Earth are mild: most places never get impossibly hot or unbearably cold. One thing that has been crucial for life is that this tilt has stayed the same for very long periods: for millions of years, the angle of tilt has varied by only a couple of degrees.

What has kept the Earth so steady? The gravity of our moon.

In contrast, Mars only has two tiny moons, which have negligible gravity. Without a stabilizing influence, Mars has gradually tumbled back and forth, its tilt ranging between 0 and 60 degrees over millions of years. Extreme changes in climate have resulted. Any Martian life that ever existed would have found the need to continually adapt very challenging.

Without our moon, the Earth, too, would likely have been subject to chaotic climate conditions, rather than the relative certainty of the seasons that stretches back deep into the fossil record.

The gravity of the moon also produces the Earth’s tides. Billions of years ago, the ebb and flow of the oceans produced an alternating cycle of high and low salt content on ancient rocky shores. This recurring cycle could have enabled the unique chemical processes needed to generate the first DNA-like molecules.

...we shouldn’t be discouraged by the fact that most exoplanets found so far are bloated gaseous beasts, with hostile environments unlikely to support life as we know it. What we don’t know yet, crucially, is whether these exoplanets have moons. This prospect is exciting, because exomoons are expected to be smaller rocky or icy bodies, possibly hosting oceans and atmospheres....

Thinking at a Distance

Nice story about plants that can camouflage themselves.

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/19/the-sneaky-life-of-the-worlds-most-mysterious-plant/

The use of superlative and the adjective "sneaky," in the title, "The sneaky life of the world's most mysterious plant," suggests the authors may never discover  mysteries at lot closer than the Amazon jungle. That of course is just one of many things I do not know.