Galaxy

GLASGOW, Scotland - Marc Lester expects jeers and boos to ring loudly in his ears when he lines up in the color purple of the Frankfurt Galaxy at World Bowl XI today. Morgan State's all-time leading wide receiver confronts traditional foe Rhein Fire in the annual championship game of NFL Europe at Hampden Park (noon on Fox). Lester is the primary reason the hometown Scottish Claymores will not contend for the World Bowl, and he will feel the wrath of their bitter supporters. The Ravens' practice squad receiver scored four touchdowns, including three in one game, in sweeping the Claymores during the regular season.

As the Hubble Space Telescope's new camera blinked to life a few weeks ago, transmitting sublime views of galactic tumult on the outskirts of time, gasping astronomers were not all merely agog over a new set of data points. The phantasmic glow of infant stars and massive galaxies not only promised that the science would continue to advance further into its golden age but, for some, suggested even more transcendent possibilities. "It's not the awesomeness of the science that makes me believe that there has to be a God," says Howard Bushouse, a Hubble astronomer who studies galaxy collisions and star birth.

An experimental fix that astronauts made in March to the Hubble Space Telescope's broken infrared camera has it working better now than when it was new. Hubble scientists unveiled new images from the camera yesterday and told astronomers meeting in Albuquerque, N.M., that the repairs to the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer have made it 30 percent to 40 percent more sensitive than when it was installed in the orbiting observatory in...

When you get close to 40, it's tough to justify playing with Star Wars action figures. But thanks to Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and an army of video game programmers, we older kids have an outlet for our enthusiasm now that George Lucas has revved up the 25-year-old franchise with today's release of the latest movie installment, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. The filmmaker's gaming company, LucasArts Entertainment (www.lucasarts.com), has turned out great and not-so-great titles over the years using the characters and story lines from the Star Wars pictures.

WASHINGTON - The first pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope's powerful new Advanced Camera for Surveys were released yesterday, and they are so packed with detail that astronomers had to blow one of them up into an 8-foot-by-8-foot poster to show it all off. "It's just galaxy after galaxy," said Johns Hopkins University astronomer Holland Ford, principal investigator on the advanced camera team. "My colleagues and I were stunned. We had underestimated how extraordinary the images would be."

Hoping to stake a bigger claim in the multibillion dollar cruise industry, Maryland transportation and tourism officials welcomed the Celebrity cruise ship Galaxy to Baltimore yesterday for the first of what will be about two dozen voyages the ship will make to the port this year. Though cruise ships have routinely called over the years, the 78,000-ton Galaxy's arrival marked the first time in years that a cruise line has dedicated such a large ship to serving Baltimore for a substantial part of the season.

Using a celestial oddity to boost its telescope's power, a team of American and European astronomers has detected what may be one of the universe's earliest galaxies in its infancy. The feeble little galaxy - a cluster of only a few million young stars - is thought to be the first example ever observed of what some theorists suggest was once a population of fragmentary "building-block" galaxies, which later merged to form the vast galaxies that dominate the universe. "We would expect to find many more of them if the theory is correct," said Richard Ellis, professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, whose team is seeking more.

WASHINGTON - Black holes, it turns out, are like cockroaches. You can't see them, but there are more out there than you can possibly imagine. Peering patiently through two seemingly empty gaps in the night sky with NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers at Johns Hopkins and Penn State universities have discovered the gaps are filled with swarms of objects glowing faintly in X-rays. Observers aiming powerful ground-based telescopes at the same places then confirmed that most of these feeble beacons are so far away that they had to be powered by massive black holes at the cores of distant galaxies.

NEW YORK - Latrell Sprewell cooled down yesterday afternoon after the New York Knicks ended a brief shootaround before their game against the Dallas Mavericks. This was the Knicks' final contest before the NBA's All-Star break. Sprewell, happily - some might say miraculously - was an All-Star again. In December 1997, Sprewell, then with the Golden State Warriors, became the symbol of everything that was wrong with rich, professional athletes when he choked his coach, P. J. Carlesimo. Today, Carlesimo is out of coaching, and Sprewell will be playing in one of the NBA's showcase events.

Frederick-based Galaxy Information Services LLC will merge with the e-commerce division of Atlanta's Third Millennium Communications Inc., creating a company that can offer online trade shows and build electronic marketplaces for each of the nation's 3,500 trade associations. The merger, announced yesterday, is the newest wrinkle in the rush to create online marketplaces in the "business-to-business" portion of the electronic-commerce arena. Up to now, many of the virtual marketplaces built for various industries are being created by outsiders -- technology firms without long-standing industry ties that were created, essentially, to establish those markets.