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　　URBANA, ILL．(AP)-Mike dropped out of college to support his pregnant(怀孕的)girlfriend and now works as a manager of a trucking company, Lynn graduated with honors from Harvard University and was hired as a lawyer with a top law firm in a major city．What do these two people have in common? Ten years ago they were both high school valedictorians(致告别辞者)．

　　A University of Illinois study follows the lives of 81 valedictorians and salutatorians(致词的学生代表)who graduated a decade ago from public and private high schools in the state．

　　Tales of Success and Failure

　　The study found tales of success and failure．The research on 46 women and 35 men found that some were doctors and scientists, one was a drug addict, another was a waitress with emotional problems．

　　"There is a popular idea about people who do well in school doing well in life," said Terry Denny, professor of education．Denny conducted the study with Karen Arnold, a former graduate student of Denny' s who is now a professor at Boston College．Denny and Arnold contacted the 81 students before graduation, and then followed up with interviews nearly every other year．They also sent them questionnaires in the mail．

　　Varied Careers

　　One-third of the students are lawyers, or have a doctorate．Nineteen are in business and 15 are engineers or computer scientists．Others include a farmer, a stock broker, and an aerobics instructor．

　　Arnold says many of the students have only average positions in the work world and that "most are not headed for greatness in their careers．" Denny, however, says that it is too early to make such predictions．"Who expects someone to be on the Supreme Court at the age of 28 or to be the discoverer of an important scientific invention right after college?" he said．"These students are just getting started in life．They are just beginning to find out what life is all about．"

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　　WASHINGTON(AP)－Astronomers believe they’ve found the oldest thing they’ve ever seen in the universe：It’s a galaxy(星系)far, far away from a time long, long ago．

　　Hidden in a Hubble Space Telescope photo released earlier this year is a small point of light that European astronomers now calculate is a galaxy from 13．1 billion years ago．That’s a time when the universe was very young, just about 600 million years old．That would make it the earliest and most distant galaxy seen so far．

　　By now the galaxy is so ancient it probably doesn’t exist in its earlier form and has already changed into bigger neighbors, said Matthew Lehnert of the Paris Observatory, lead author of the study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature．

　　“We are looking at the universe when it was a 20th of its current age,” said California Institute of Technology astronomy professor Richard Ellis, who wasn’t part of the discovery team．“In human terms, we’re looking at a 4-year-old boy in the lifetime of an adult．”

　　While Ellis finds the basis for the study “pretty good”, there have been other claims about the age of distant space objects that have not held up to careful examination．And some experts have questions about this one．But even the doubters praised the study as important and interesting．

　　The European astronomers calculated the age after 16 hours of observations from a telescope in Chile that looked at light signatures of cooling hydrogen gas．

　　Earlier this year, astronomers had made a general estimate of 600 to 800 million years after the Big Bang(宇宙大爆炸)for the most distant unclear points of light in the Hubble photograph, which was presented at an astronomy meeting back in January．

　　In the new study, researchers focused on a single galaxy in their analysis of hydrogen’s light signature, further finding out the age．Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was the scientist behind the Hubble image, said it provided confirmation for the age using a different method, something he called amazing “for such faint objects”．

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