John Bally

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.

In the constellation Orion, in the cloud of gas and dust L1641, the young star PR Ori B suddenly flared up like a furnace that someone had thrown fuel into. Its brightness rose fivefold, and astronomers watched for the first time as a fuor was born, a rare event in which a star begins greedily swallowing material from the surrounding disk.