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Long before a star ignites, its birth is shaped by invisible particles racing through space at near-light speed.
These cosmic rays quietly alter the chemistry and temperature inside dark clouds, helping determine when the clouds can collapse and begin forming stars.
For the first time, astronomers have directly measured the influence of these particles inside a dense, starless cloud, providing a long-sought reading from the heart of a stellar nursery.
The discovery offers a more precise way to understand how stars – and eventually planets – begin.
A measurable stellar cloud
Barnard 68 is a small, cold cloud of gas and dust with no stars inside, making it an unusually quiet place to isolate the influence of those particles.
By tracing their imprint within this cold, opaque cloud, scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology were able to document the effect directly rather than infer it from distant byproducts.