Luis A. Zapata

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.

In the quiet of cold molecular clouds, where interstellar gas under gravity condenses into dense clumps, the birth of massive stars is one of the great puzzles of astrophysics.