A nearby dwarf galaxy poses an intriguing mystery: How is it able to form brilliant star clusters without the dusty, gas-rich environments found in larger galaxies? The answer, astronomers believe, ...

When a star is born, it doesn’t emerge in isolation. Instead, it forms inside a large, chaotic cloud of gas and dust. Around it, a flat disk of spinning material takes shape. This protoplanetary disk ...

Besides being a point of light, a star is a luminous, spherical mass of plasma, enough to hold itself together under its own gravity. On its own, though, gravitational rounding isn't enough. What ...

How does a star form from the cold, turbulent gloom of a molecular cloud? Three years have already passed since the James Webb Space Telescope has been revealing how, most recently by removing the ...