Stars are born in nurseries with a collection of siblings that range in mass but share chemical compositions and dynamic histories. The natal environment containing a large number of “just-born” celestial objects is called a “Star Forming Region”. We find them scattered across the Milky Way primarily in the disk of the Galaxy. In this article I review four fast facts of these critical components to propagating new generations of stars in the Universe.
Jackie Faherty, astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History and Editor at The Daily Galaxy.
Editor, Jackie Faherty, astrophysicist, Senior Scientist with AMNH. Jackie was formerly a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Aside from a love of scientific research, she is a passionate educator and can often be found giving public lectures in the Hayden Planetarium. Her research team has won multiple grants from NASA, NSF, and the Heising Simons foundation to support projects focused on characterising planet-like objects. She has also co-founded the popular citizen science project entitled Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 which invites the general public to help scan the solar neighbourhood for previously missed cold worlds. A Google Scholar, Faherty has over 100 peer reviewed articles in astrophysical journals and has been an invited speaker at universities and conferences across the globe. Jackie received the 2020 Vera Rubin Early Career Prize from the American Astronomical Society, an award that recognises scientists who have made an impact in the field of dynamical astronomy and the 2021 Robert H Goddard Award for science accomplishments.