2:00-2:30 pm

While our Sun is almost 5 billion years old, stars still form in thethe dark clouds of our Milky Way. When we observe those regions we canlearn how star and planet formation works, so that we also understandthe formation of our own solar system and the Earth better.I will describe how we observe those regions that are hidden to thenaked eye using infrared and X-ray telescopes to obtain stunningimages of stellar nurseries. Zooming in on just a fewof the young stars, I show how a gas cloud collapses to form a hot gascore that is the birth place of another sun and possibly a fewplanets. This is the stage of star formation where I concentrate myown research and I will describe how professional astronomers gainaccess to space telescopes, share my experiences of how to use the HubbleSpace Telescope (HST) for my observations of young stars and I willshow an example of how we process the observations to extractscientific conclusions. Star formation is a very active area of research with many openquestions to solve and certainly one of the areas in astronomy that delivers extremely beautiful images of the Milky Way that surrounds us.