Scientists Discover a Massive, Glowing Blob of Hydrogen Very Close to Our Solar System

The birthplace of stars begins within large, cold clouds of gas and dust, which eventually collapse under the weight of gravity. Molecular clouds are vast cosmic entities that often stretch for hundreds of light-years, and scientists just discovered a massive one lurking in our celestial neighborhood. The cloud, named Eos after the Greek goddess of dawn, was discovered around 300 light-years away from our solar system. It is one of the largest single structures in the sky, and may be the closest molecular cloud to Earth, according to a paper published this week in Nature Astronomy. Because it’s so close, it offers astronomers a unique front row seat to the star-forming process and to observe the molecular universe. Stellar nurseries in our general galactic neighborhood lie along the surface of the Local Bubble, a large, hot cavity of plasma surrounded by a shell of gas and dust. In order to find the molecular clouds within that bubble, scientists have had to rely on observations of d ... Read full article.