Astronomers have captured new, detailed maps of three nearby interstellar gas clouds containing regions of ongoing high-mass star formation. The results of this survey, called the Star Formation ...

The chemical foundations of life could be found in the frigid pockets of molecular clouds that exist in the space between ...

Researchers may have figured out how a crucial ingredient that cells need to produce energy could form in deep space. Calculations and lab experiments suggest that glyceric acid can arise from ...

The formation of stars is intricately linked to the complex structure and dynamics of molecular clouds—vast, cold, and dense regions in the interstellar medium that primarily consist of molecular ...

The birth of a planet starts with a microscopic grain floating in a protoplanetary disk, a swirling cloud of gas and other particles surrounding a young star. How the gas and dust interact has ...

Fullerenes were first discovered by Harry Kroto in the 1970s, for which he and his colleagues received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Recently, fullerenes have been detected in the stellar winds of red ...

The discovery marks the first time a molecular cloud has been detected using light emitted in the far-ultraviolet spectrum. “This opens up new possibilities for studying the molecular universe,” said ...

Galactic gas shows varying heavy element distribution: blue indicates scarcity, red indicates richness. Credit: T. Hayakawa/Y. Fukui, Nagoya University Galactic gas shows varying heavy element ...

Molecular clouds are huge masses of gas and dust that are remnants of galaxy formation.