Here is my contribution to the "Hubble - Mission Universum" series by the Austrian TV channel Servus TV. In it I create a star with my bare hands, while discussing my research in star and planet formation. I confess I was impressed by the quality of the series, well done, Servus TV.

The rapid advance of computer capabilities over the last two decades has opened up a new field of numerical simulations in which detailed physical models can be made to represent the most complex processes. "Computational Star Formation" reviews the latest techniques and results of numerical simulations relevant to interstellar gas dynamics and star formation. Topics range from dynamics to radiation and visualization, as applied to both local and cosmological problems. This book is ideal for graduate students and researchers in numerical astrophysics. It's really good. Buy it here! 

The next generation of large telescopes will need Multiconjugate Adaptive Optics. But will this new technique work? 30 Dor is one of the regions that always reminds me of how little we know about star formation. It is an impressive star factory, unlike any of our Milkyway, and it is also the perfect target to test Multiconjugate Adaptive optics Demonstrator (MAD) at the Very Large Telescope, with the Near-Infrared camera CAMCAO. The technique works, and the paper presenting first results, that contradict results from optical wavelengths, is here. 

Both the yield and rate of star formation can vary considerably in clouds, independent of their mass and size, but above a certain threshold in column density clouds become predictable. In this paper we find that the star formation rate is proportional to the cloud mass above an extinction threshold of A_K ≈ 0.8 mag, corresponding to a gas surface density threshold of Σ_gas ≈ 116M_⊙ pc². (or volume densities about 10⁴ cm^-3). In other words, once you have dense gas you have stars. The more dense gas you have, the more the stars you'll produce. Understanding star formation is understanding how nature transforms diffuse gas into dense gas. Easy. 

There is something funny about dark clouds. They have terrible complicated geometries, a wide range of evolutionary status and star formation histories, but yet they all seem to have the basic underlying structure. Why? And what are the log-normals hiding? 

This is paper III of the 2MASS wide field extinction maps series, this time mapping of a large region in the sky (~ 3500 deg²) towards the directions of Taurus, Perseus, and Aries. The map was constructed with the colors of ~23 million stars. We find a ~ 25° × 15° region close to the galactic plane (l ~ 135°, b ~ -14°) with small extinction (A_K < 0.04 mag); we name this region the Perseus-Andromeda hole.  The maps have an amazing wealth of new information on molecular cloud structure, and are just gorgeous to look at.