In the cold gas clouds where giant stars are born, everything is churning with motion. Gas compresses, swirls, and fragments into clumps — the future stars. For a long time, it was thought that the magnetic field brought order here: like invisible threads, it stretched clumps perpendicular to itself. But new observations showed the opposite.
Astronomers pointed the ALMA radio telescope at 30 regions where massive stars are forming. They measured how hundreds of gas clumps are elongated and compared that with the direction of the magnetic field. It turned out that clumps are more often stretched along the field, not across it. It's as if wood chips in a raging river floated along the current rather than across it.
Computer models helped explain why. When turbulence, chaotic gas vortices, is initially strong in a cloud, clumps align along the field. When the field is stronger than turbulence, they stretch across it. The observations matched the first scenario. So, in the birth of giant stars, gas vortices matter more than magnetic forces.
Another finding: the rotation axes of clumps often don't align with the field direction. This could weaken the "magnetic brake" that usually slows rotation. As a result, large disks of gas and dust, future planetary systems, can form around young giant stars.
The ALMA telescope sits at an altitude of 5000 meters in Chile's Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth, so that water vapor doesn't interfere with observations.