Star formation

Orion A molecular cloud. Credit: ESA/Herschel/Planck; J. D. Soler, MPIA

Eye On The Sky A cosmic cloud full of star-making material

An image of Rho Ophiuchi, a star-forming region in which traces of organic molecule methyl isocyanate (inset) has been found. Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2/L. Calçada

Ingredient for life found around young stars

An artist’s impression of a large-scale galaxy outflow driven (inset) by the winds from a supermassive black hole at the centre. Image Credit: ESA/ATG medialab

New stars can form in black hole winds

An ALMA image showing the centre of the Milky Way and the location of 11 protostars found remarkably close to its supermassive black hole (indicated by the star). The lines show the direction of the bipolar lobes created by high-velocity jets from the protostars. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Yusef-Zadeh et al.; B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

Stars form close to Milky Way’s black hole

The galaxies were imaged at submillimeter with ALMA (left) to show gas and dust, and with Hubble at optical (middle, showing three young star clusters) and infrared (right, showing the galactic disc). Image Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, Tadaki et al.

New-born stars cause galaxies to swell

An artist's impression of stars forming within a galaxy's outflows
Credit: ESO/E. Kornmesser

Stars born in a black hole’s breath

Created with GIMP on a Mac

Giant galaxies may grow in cool gas clouds

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Star formation occurs in ‘short bursts’

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Astronomers discover young planetary system

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Black holes power elliptical star formation

The B5 complex (red and green; radio images) seen within its neighborhood, embedded in dust (blue) as seen with ESA's Herschel Space Observatory, in infrared light.

Multiple star system seen forming

This is an artist’s impression of the quasar 3C 279. Astronomers connected the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), in Chile, to the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii, USA, and the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT) in Arizona, USA for the first time, to make the sharpest observations ever, of the centre of a distant galaxy, the bright quasar 3C 279. Quasars are the very bright centres of distant galaxies that are powered by supermassive black holes. This quasar contains a black hole with a mass about one billion times that of the Sun, and is so far from Earth that its light has taken more than 5 billion years to reach us. The team were able to probe scales of less than a light-year across the quasar — a remarkable achievement for a target that is billions of light-years away.

Quasars control star formation

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Galaxies stripped bare