The birth of a star is like cooking in a giant cosmic oven. First, an icy cloud of cosmic dust and gas contracts, and a thermonuclear fire ignites in the center, but it's still hidden behind a dense layer of 'flour'. It can only be seen in thermal rays — the dust heats up and glows, giving away the core.

Astronomers examined the rainbow fingerprints of light from thousands of stars, looking for the glow of hydrogen — a sign that a reaction is happening inside. That's how they found 26 previously unknown 'dusty buns'. The key discovery is a color scale: by matching brightness data in different infrared tones, scientists traced a path from an object thickly coated in dough to a golden star with a crispy crust.

The biggest surprise: the diagram has a gap — a stage where the dust disappears so rapidly that we hardly have time to notice it, like a biscuit that burns almost instantly in grill mode.