Astronomers have captured the clearest picture yet of how massive stars are born, revealing a dramatic interplay between ...

Researchers spotted a colossal cloud of gas and dust in the Milky Way, filled with turbulent motion, newborn star seeds, and even a natural microwave laser. This newly found Midpoint cloud appears to ...

Researchers from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have revealed for the first time how gas flows from vast distances toward the disk surrounding a ...

Is it a flying elephant? A gingerbread man? When I was little, I used to search the clouds for amusing shapes as they drifted across the sky and imagine stories about their patterns. Now I'm a ...

The formation of stars is intricately linked to the complex structure and dynamics of molecular clouds—vast, cold, and dense regions in the interstellar medium that primarily consist of molecular ...

Understanding the gas from which stars form is a fundamental goal in astrophysics. This is a pressing issue for pristine galaxies — those low in heavy elements, known as metals — whose growth remains ...

Star formation is a fundamental physical process in our universe. Stars light up the cosmos, and give rise to planets, some of which may support life. While humans have no doubt wondered about stars ...

Cosmic stream of cold gas connected to the massive Anthill Galaxy. Emission from carbon atoms in the stream is highlighted in blue, as detected with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array ...

Scientists have pierced through a dusty stellar nursery to capture the earliest and most detailed view of a collapsing gas cloud turning into a star, analogous to a baby’s first ultrasound. The ...

New computer visualization technology developed by the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing has helped astrophysicists understand that gravity plays a larger role than previously thought in deep ...

A newly released image of 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula Nebula, reveals thin spider-web-like strands of gas revealing a dramatic battle between gravity and stellar energy that could give ...

When triggered by some external agent, shockwaves can propagate through molecular clouds of gas and dust to create pockets of dense material. At a certain limit, that dense gas and dust collapses and ...