Baby Stars

New protostars that will eventually be 10 times as large as the sun have been discovered in the massive Rosette molecular cloud, 5,000 light years away. Scientists are studying the formation of such stars because they feed light and energy into the space dust around them and can trigger the formation of other stars. The Rosette cloud is associated with a larger cloud that contains enough dust and gas to make the equivalent of 10,000 Sun-like stars.