ALMA spots a nine-member stellar family in the act of formation

Article excerpt

Massive stars much bigger than our sun always come in pairs or groups, not alone. But astronomers don't fully understand how these groupings form. In a new study, astronomers using ALMA have serendipitously discovered a young system containing nine baby stars forming together, and they have detailed a rare glimpse of the formation of such a stellar family in its earliest assembly stage in a paper submitted to the arXiv preprint server on June 2.