When I was a kid I read a lot of comic books. This was the comic book where they revealed how the superhero came to posses his amazing strength, x-ray vision or bulletproof underwear. There is a special fascination for Origin Stories that extends beyond comic books to almost all aspects of human activity. From the special episode of Friends were we learn how all the characters ended up sharing the same apartment to my daughters insistence on being told her the tale of her birth again and again, we all want to know how things began.
Astronomy is no different.
There are many stories to tell of the heavens - exploding supernova, colliding asteroids, cosmic rays crashing through the atmosphere. Stories of beginnings however seem to hold a special interest. Astronomers think they understand how stars are born. Every so often a chunk of a giant interstellar cloud of gas and dust falls victim to its own gravity. Matter rains down on the cloudlet's center and slowly a proto-stellar core is assembled from the infalling gas.