following the north star…s?

A quickie from HubbleSite: astronomers have determined that Polaris (the North Star) “is actually a triple-star system”:http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2006/02/ with two of the stars so close together that it takes the full power of Hubble to differentiate them.

Watching as the world vanishes

An “important read”:http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/02/opinion/edroxana.php from the International Herald Tribune

bq. Fanaticism is a driving force here, as it often is behind great crimes. This is a crime against nature, and this fanaticism is economic – the belief that money and profit should outweigh all other considerations, including survival of the species.

it’s a lot like life

From “yesterday’s New Scientist”:http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=dn8507:

bq. The first evidence that some of the basic organic building blocks of life can exist in an Earth-like orbit around a young Sun-like star has been provided by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

Nicely done. I can’t wait to go visit some of these places…