A new star map includes the most comprehensive images anyone has ever seen of the Milky Way’s cold interstellar gas clouds where new stars are born.
For the last 50 years, astronomers have turned their telescopes, be they on satellites in space or observatories on Earth, to the wide swaths of interstellar medium to get a look at the formation and birth of stars.
But until now, they’ve looked more like weather maps showing storm systems instead of glittering bursts of light that the untrained observer might expect of a “star map,” researchers say.
“These images tell us amazing new things about the Milky Way’s star-forming clouds,” says Peter Barnes, an astronomer at the University of Florida. “For example, they show that we have probably underestimated the amount of material in these clouds by a factor of two or three. This has important consequences for how we measure the star formation activity, not only throughout the Milky Way, but also for all other galaxies beyond.
“Additionally, it gives us important new insights into the circumstances of the birth of our own solar system, such as the overall temperature, density, and mass distribution in these clouds.”
