Kee-Tae Kim

At the center of our Galaxy lies a dense forest of dust and gas. Starlight barely penetrates this thicket, like a flashlight in fog. But it is precisely there, in this dense cloud, that new stars are born. Scientists decided to look into this fog. They took light from 15 bright stars that shine through cold clouds.

In the stellar nursery HOPS-288, where three suns are forming, the ALMA telescope revealed two scorching regions around a pair of them. At –170°C, ice on cosmic dust melts, and reactions bubble up in the gas: organic molecules are born — methanol and methyl formate.

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.

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.

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.