Fengwei Xu

In the dark cloud G318.049+00.086, where no star has yet formed, dust and gas have arranged themselves into four long filaments. They converge into a dense central hub, like four rivers emptying into a lake. Gas flows along these filaments toward the center: the flow speed reaches 10–20 kilometers per second per parsec of length.

Inside cold clouds of gas and dust where new stars ignite, astronomers have spotted unexpectedly delicate structures. The ALMA telescope, working in the millimeter range, has revealed more than 323 ultra-thin dust filaments within 121 massive clumps.

In a kitchen where you're simultaneously boiling soup, frying meat, and baking bread, everything happens in one pot. That's roughly what the central molecular zone (CMZ) looks like — a dense clump of gas at the very heart of the Milky Way.

Long before a star ignites in a gas cloud, chemical life is already bustling. In cold, dense clumps of gas, called starless cores, atoms stick together to form molecules, both simple and complex. To peer into this invisible kitchen, astronomers aimed a 40-meter radio telescope in Yebes at 23 such clouds in the Orion Nebula.

Radio telescopes detected emissions from the celestial object G358.93-0.03 MM1 — a hot cocoon inside which a massive star is igniting. Within that glow, lines of glycolamide appeared, a delicate carbon molecule.

In cold clouds of interstellar gas, long, dense filaments stretch out. Inside them, like overcrowded incubators, future stars are maturing. For a long time, it was thought that within such filaments, everything was governed by gravity: matter smoothly flows toward the centers, where density increases and eventually a star ignites.

In a dense cloud of gas and dust where giant stars are born, the ALMA telescope has spotted something familiar. Four thin gas jets shoot out from the same region, each leaving behind a chain of bright knots, like a dashed line.

For nearly half a century, astronomers have been searching for glycine, the simplest amino acid and one of the fundamental building blocks of proteins, in the interstellar medium.