The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.
Amid the roilings of the Milky Way, immense pockets of gas coalesce into clouds where stars are born. In this process, there is a hidden hand at play: magnetism.
“There’s this fantastic quote: You can measure a man’s ignorance by the strength of his magnetic field,” said Susan Clark, an astrophysicist at Stanford University. “In other words, when we have a piece of a problem historically in astrophysics that we don’t fully understand, just blame the magnetic field. Just wave our hands and say, ‘Ah! The magnetic field!’”
Exactly how this fundamental force helps sculpt our galaxy has long eluded scientists, largely