Image: Star formation in the Chamaeleon

A dark cloud when observed with optical telescopes, the Chamaeleon I region reveals itself as an active hub of star formation in this far-infrared image from ESA's Herschel space observatory. Only around 550 light-years away ...

How Herschel unlocked the secrets of star formation

Surveying the sky for almost four years to observe the glow of cold cosmic dust embedded in interstellar clouds of gas, the Herschel Space Observatory has provided astronomers with an unprecedented glimpse into the stellar ...

Orphaned protostars

Stars form as gravity contracts the gas and dust in an interstellar cloud until clumps develop that are dense enough to coalesce into stars. Precisely how this happens, however, is very uncertain, and the processes are hard ...

Image: Spokes in Serpens Core

The interstellar medium fills the 'empty' space between the stars in our galaxy. It is a mix of molecular clouds, cold and warm gases, regions of electrically charged hydrogen, and more.

James Webb Space Telescope 'wings' successfully deployed

Recently inside the clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, engineers successfully completed two deployments for the James Webb Space Telescope's "wings" or side portions of the backplane ...

Old astronomic riddle on the way to be solved

Scientists at the University of Basel were able to identify for the first time a molecule responsible for the absorption of starlight in space: the positively charged buckminsterfullerene. Their results have been published ...

NASA Ames reproduces the building blocks of life in laboratory

NASA scientists studying the origin of life have reproduced uracil, cytosine, and thymine, three key components of our hereditary material, in the laboratory. They discovered that an ice sample containing pyrimidine exposed ...

One of the Milky Way's arms might encircle the entire galaxy

Given that our Solar System sits inside the Milky Way Galaxy, getting a clear picture of what it looks like as a whole can be quite tricky. In fact, it was not until 1852 that astronomer Stephen Alexander first postulated ...

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