Picture This

Glowing stellar nurseries in a web of cosmic filaments

A vast star-forming region as seen by the European Space Agency’s Herschel space observatory shows a tangled web of filaments with embedded hot spots where stars are being born. Observations of such filaments indicate a common process is at work to generate such filaments — and stars — from the interstellar medium.

News

Peeking into our galaxy’s stellar nursery

Astronomers have long turned their telescopes to the wide swaths of interstellar medium to get a look at the formation and birth of stars. A team of international researchers has just released the most comprehensive images anyone has ever seen of the Milky Way’s cold interstellar gas clouds where new stars and solar systems are being born.