Even if you live in an urban area where light pollution makes it hard to see the full glory of the night sky, most people can find the seven stars that make what we call “The Big Dipper” (or, as the French so aptly call it, “La Casserole” — “the saucepan”). Polaris, the North Star, is the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere, and very easily located, and the other six stars are also big, bright objects. Two of the stars, Alcor and Mizar, were found to be a binary pair many years ago, but more recent observations have now determined that there are additional stars gravitationally bound to them, creating a cluster of six stars, the first such grouping ever discovered. The discovery came as astronomers were looking for planets orbiting Alcor, and they think there may still be planets or other objects to be found there.
At the opposite end of things, researchers at UMass Amherst are working on building a microscope that should be able to resolve an image of an individual molecule. The researchers are trying to develop a better understanding of how a protein called tubulin controls cell division, and they expect that their microscope will let them watch real-time reactions of tubulin down to its molecular level.
