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10 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: October 18, 2026.
A University of Duisburg-Essen team's new simulation shows the clumpy structure of a stellar nursery shields parts of the cloud from ultraviolet light and reproduces the arcs and filaments seen by the James Webb Space Telescope.
By stacking data on hundreds of galaxies, Arizona State astronomers found hydrogen glowing along jet paths deep into the gas halos that feed star birth, but not in other directions.
The IC 348 panorama shows newborn stars firing jets into the surrounding gas, two protostars with nearly parallel outflows, and a planet-mass object that appears to have its own disk. The lightest brown dwarfs also carry an unidentified hydrocarbon in their atmospheres.
A new three-way diagnostic separates starlight, black-hole radiation and shocks pixel by pixel. It suggests active black holes can trigger star formation as well as choke it.
The first detailed molecular gas map of the colliding galaxy group shows that the regions with the most violent gas motion form stars least efficiently, even where there is plenty of raw material.
Star formation is running at less than half the rate it did 4.5 billion years ago. A survey of 2.5 million galaxies says the raw gas supply has barely dropped, which breaks the standard explanation.
ALMA resolved a magnetic field coiled around the gas streaming off a protostar 960 light-years away. It is a few thousandths of a gauss — weaker than a fridge magnet, and strong enough to shape a star.
Using the XRISM X-ray observatory, astronomers tracked ferocious outflows from the supermassive black hole in NGC 4151 that can strip away the very gas needed to build new stars.
Supercomputer simulations on Japan's ATERUI III show interstellar magnetic fields strip rotational energy from forming star pairs, letting two protostars spiral together fast enough to match what astronomers actually see.
A precessing black hole jet in galaxy VV 340a is sweeping hot plasma across its entire host galaxy like a cosmic sprinkler, stripping star-forming gas at a rate equivalent to 19 suns per year.