In 1985, the physicist Heinz R. Pagels wrote, "Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the young, but never the actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event." In the decades since then, astronomers have drawn closer and closer to figuring out what actually goes on in the veiled stellar nurseries throughout the Universe. The tale of starbirth we know today invokes the collapse of clouds of gas and dust into prestellar cores, but it still has many unknowns, such as the role of magnetic fields in the clouds where stars are born.

Researchers from Kyushu University and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have used radio astronomy techniques to study the magnetic field influence in prestellar cores. Lead researcher Doris Arzoumanian at Kyushu explained her team's findings using the Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Millimetre Range (IRAM) to study a prestellar core called L1544. It lies in a region of the Milky Way called the Taurus Molecular Complex.…