Min Fang

The birth of a star is like cooking in a giant cosmic oven. First, an icy cloud of cosmic dust and gas contracts, and a thermonuclear fire ignites in the center, but it's still hidden behind a dense layer of 'flour'. It can only be seen in thermal rays — the dust heats up and glows, giving away the core.

A pot of boiling porridge: bubbles burst, steam escapes, and everything gets mixed up. Massive stars in giant gas clouds behave in much the same way. Their radiation and stellar winds blow out enormous cavities, molecular bubbles, scattering material all around.

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.