Question. What is a interstellar cloud?
Answer. The vast speaces between stars are not empty
but contain particles of matter and larger grains dust. In some places
this interstellar material has been swept up into giant dense clouds.
Some of these clouds will streach across tens of lightyears and contain
thousands of times the mass of our sun. Stars form inside these clouds
when gravity causes a small chunk of the cloud to collapse on itself.
Below is an image of the an interstellar cloud from
the Hubble Space Telescope

|