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 A new asteroid was discovered by the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission in November of 2016, designated 2016 WF9. While the mission finally decided to designate the object as an asteroid a few days later, 2016 WF9 presented an interesting puzzle: while it appears to be a comet in structure, it also lacks the dust and gas cloud that is characteristic of what we expect from comets.
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The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program is currently investigating a high-energy signal burst that originated from a star 95 light years away, in the constellation Hercules. SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak cautions that this is unlikely to be an artificial signal, as there are a number of natural phenomena that could also have produced the signal.

The signal was recorded by Russian astronomers at the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya. Unfortunately, the signal was recorded on May 15, 2015, nearly a year and a half ago, a delay that severely hampers verification of the other signal from other telescopes. Nonetheless, SETI will be listening to the star on the off chance that there might be a repeat of the signal.
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The more we study it, the universe continues to become curiouser and curiouser, and the last few weeks have been no exception: X marks the center of the galaxy; one of Saturn’s rings was broken; and NASA plans to destroy Juno space probe — to protect aliens?

Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute and the University of Toronto have verified the existence of an extremely large X-shaped arrangement of stars at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, a structure that was hinted at by previous observations of other galaxies and computer models. From Earth’s point of view, the galaxy’s central bulge of millions of stars looks like a peanut shape, with the X-structure being an integral part of this.
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An exoplanet 320 light-years from Earth has been found in a trinary star system, photographed by the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile. Aside from having the distinction of being one of mere handful of exoplanets that have been directly imaged, the planet, labeled as HD 131399Ab, has a year that lasts 550 Earth years, as it orbits the large central star.
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