“Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.” said Immanuel Kant, and he thought “stars form from the gravitational collapse of large clouds of gas”. Two and half centuries have passed, how much more than Kant do we know about star formation?

    The photo shows a pair of neighbor molecular clouds, Pipe and Ophiuchus, that have similar masses and ages yet very different star formation rates,
    evident from Ophiuchus’s burst of colors due to stellar feedback.

    “Things certainly cannot be assessed according to their mass (gravity) alone” (Huainanzi, 淮南子, 150 BC), and today astronomers believe that turbulence and magnetic fields are behind the scenes of star formation. But, how exactly? Here are the small pieces of the puzzle we have collected, along with the tools we designed for this purpose.