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Word of the day:  solatium\so-LAY-shee-um\ noun: a compensation (as money) given as solace for suffering, loss, or injured feelings.

NEW:  Star Gazing   Testing Relativity:  Cancer, the crab, scuttles across the east on winter evenings. It climbs into view by around 9 o'clock. The planet Saturn, which looks like a bright golden star, is passing through the constellation, so it'll help you find it. Cancer's most prominent feature is a star cluster known as the Beehive, which is above Saturn as they rise.

One of the crab's most interesting features is a binary star system. The two stars are only 50,000 miles apart -- just one-fifth of the distance from Earth to the Moon -- and they're getting closer by the hour. This tightening embrace provides support for Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Relativity says that gravity travels through space as waves. The waves are so tiny that they haven't been detected directly. More about the search for them tomorrow.

But there are indirect ways to look for the waves -- and that's where the star system comes in.

It consists of two white-dwarf stars -- the dense cores of once-normal stars like the Sun. NASA astronomer Tod Strohmayer found that the stars appear to orbit each other about every five and a half minutes. But the orbit is speeding up, which means the stars must be getting closer together -- by about an inch per hour.

Relativity says that as the stars orbit each other, gravity waves carry off some of their energy and orbital momentum, so the stars get closer. Eventually, they may merge, creating a titanic outburst of gravity waves.  www.stardate.org.