A Cloudy Mystery

[Waspie_Dwarf]

A Cloudy Mystery

A puzzling cloud near the galaxy's center may hold clues to how stars are born

PASADENA, Calif.—It's the mystery of the curiously dense cloud. And astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) are on the case.

Near the crowded galactic center, where billowing clouds of gas and dust cloak a supermassive black hole three million times as massive as the sun—a black hole whose gravity is strong enough to grip stars that are whipping around it at thousands of kilometers per second—one particular cloud has baffled astronomers. Indeed, the cloud, dubbed G0.253+0.016, defies the rules of star formation.

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