Molecular Clouds All the Way Down

Gas to Stars

Each of the many hundreds of stars we can see with our naked eye, or the many thousands we can see with the aid of telescopes, has their own special story of how they came to be. Now self-gravitating balls of gas, these stars in the night sky began as clumps in dense molecular clouds. Once these clumps become large enough, they gravitationally collapse and form stars. In our own galaxy, the Milky Way, we can  study this process directly, and use the observations to infer much about its workings in more distant galaxies.

Read more here – https://astrobites.org/2021/05/07/molecular-clouds-all-the-way-down/