The formation of sunlike stars.

Understanding how stars like the sun formed constitutes one of the principal challenges confronting modern astrophysics. In recent years, advances in observational technology, particularly at infrared and millimeter wavelengths, have produced an avalanche of critical data and unexpected discoveries about the process of star formation, which is blocked from external view at optical and shorter wavelengths by an obscuring blanket of interstellar dust. Fueled by this new knowledge, a comprehensive empirical picture of stellar genesis is beginning to emerge, laying the foundations for a coherent theory of the birth of sunlike stars.