Rolf Kuiper

In the dark cloud NGC 6334I-North, 5500 light-years from Earth, the ALMA radio interferometer spotted something unexpected: around a young massive star, a disk of gas and dust is swirling, and inside it are seven dense clumps. Each one could become a star. This is what the birth of a stellar family looks like, and an unusually large one at that.

At the center of a cosmic dust cloud, astronomers detected an invisible star. It's wrapped in a rotating gas disk. This disk works like a set of scales: the gas speed at different distances from the center reveals the star’s mass. The pattern is simple: the closer to the center, the faster the motion.