APEX turns its eye to dark clouds in Taurus

A new image from the APEX (Atacama Pathfinder Experiment) telescope in Chile shows a sinuous filament of cosmic dust more than ten light-years long. In it, newborn stars are hidden, and dense clouds of gas are on the verge of collapsing to form yet more stars. The cosmic dust grains are so cold that observations at wavelengths of around one millimetre, such as these made with the LABOCA camera, are needed to detect their glow. Read more