Blakesley Burkhart Leads Discovery of Hidden Star-Forming Cloud Near Earth, Eos Illuminates Cosmos
April 27, 2025
An international team of scientists led by a Rutgers University-New Brunswick astrophysicist has discovered a potentially star-forming cloud that is one of the largest single structures in the sky and among the closest to the sun and Earth ever to be detected.
The vast ball of hydrogen, long invisible to scientists, was revealed by looking for its main constituent – molecular hydrogen. The finding marks the first time a molecular cloud has been detected with light emitted in the far-ultraviolet realm of the electromagnetic spectrum and opens the way to further explorations using the approach.
The scientists have named the molecular hydrogen cloud “Eos,” after the Greek goddess of mythology who is the personification of dawn. Their discovery is outlined in a study published in Nature Astronomy.
Astrophysicist Blakesley Burkhart led the team that discovered the molecular gas cloud, Eos.
“This opens up new possibilities for studying the molecular universe,” said Blakesley Burkhart, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences who led the team and is an author on the study. Burkhart is also a research scientist at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York.