Geeeeks... iiiiiiiinnn...... spaaaaaaaace!

A spectrogram of some not-too-distant stars showed one has a dust ring with some organic molecules in it. This is interesting because it fits very nicely with our whole idea of how our solar system's planets formed -- the star looks like the Sun may have a few billion years ago, and we think those organic molecules may have been floating around since then. The organics are important because life as we know it is built around them; the two found around the star are base components of some proteins. Nearly every element on Earth heavier than helium originated in the course of some dead star's life anyway, and it's not a stretch to suppose that some of the complex molecules did too.

Of course, space isn't the only place you can get organic compounds.

Also in space news, Uranus seems to have a fairly unstable ring system. Astronomers found a second set of rings, far outside the orbit of the first set, and a pair of new moons. But the way everything interacts gravitationally around Uranus seems to be fairly chaotic -- no stable equilibrium has been reached, and apparently if we wait a few million years we'll see a few of the moons collide.

And also related to space... well no, not related to space at all I suppose, here are some big Lego structures.