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Narrator (Megan Watzke, CXC): A new study from two of NASA's "Great Observatories" provides
fresh insight into how some stars are born, along with a beautiful new image of a stellar
nursery in our own Milky Way Galaxy. While astronomers have long understood that stars
and planets form from the collapse of a cloud of gas, the main causes of this process have
remained mysterious. Now, research on an object known as Cepheus B, a cloud of hydrogen about
2400 light years from Earth, helps answer that question. X-rays seen by Chandra show
where the young stars in the cloud are, while infrared emission observed by Spitzer reveals
whether these stars contain planet-forming disks around them. Taken together, these data
reveal that radiation from massive stars is triggering a new generation of stars to be
born. This happens more often than previously thought.