An island of calm at the violent heart of the galaxy

Where would you go to watch a star being born?

Probably not the heart of the Milky Way, which is about the most violent neighborhood our galaxy has to offer, a maelstrom of gas churning so fast and so chaotically that you would think nothing could ever settle there long enough to collapse into a star.

And yet stars do form in that turmoil, and astronomers have just begun to work out how by finding an unexpected pocket of calm in the chaos. ...