Stars form as gravity coalesces the gas and dust in interstellar clouds until the material produces clumps dense enough to become stars. But precisely how this happens, and whether or not the processes are the same for all stars, remains very uncertain. Astronomers have been studying very young clumps, called "pre-stellar cores" located deep within stellar wombs, in an attempt to sort out these details. But precisely because the cores have no stars in them yet, or at best only very young stars, they are faint and difficult to observe.

CfA astronomers Tyler Bourke, Phil Myers, and David Wilner, along with three colleagues, used the Submillimeter Array to do the first detailed observational study of the internal structure of a pre-stellar core. Astronomers have come to realize that birth clouds are most often filamentary in shape, not spherical, and so the team examined a suspected embryo embedded within an (even colder) filamentary cloud. They selected a filament that is relatively close by, only about 400 light-years distant, and that was known to contain within it a string of warm spots that might be stellar embryos.

Continued here: http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-ste ... bryos.html