Portal:Astronomy/Picture/13 July 2005

The full story of the formation of stars has only come to be well understood in fairly recent years. The crucial step occurs deep inside dense dark blobs of gas and dust known as Bok gobules, named after Bart Bok who first studied them. Each Bok globule contains a nascent star system, but the dense cloud completely obscures the visible light from the young stars, and astronomers have to rely on infrared and radio observations to study the process.