Skip to content Skip to navigation menu 19 April 2011 A team of
astronomers, including members of Cardiff University’s School of
Physics and Astronomy, have used the European Space Agency's
Herschel Space Observatory to show that filaments of gas and
dust in interstellar clouds have a preferred size, implying that
they have formed as a result of interstellar sonic booms
travelling through the Galaxy. The filaments are huge,
stretching for tens of light years, and Herschel has shown that
newly-born stars are found in the densest parts of them. One
such filament in the constellation of Aquila contains around 100
infant stars. The very cold gas and dust in interstellar space
can only be observed with far-infrared light. While such
filaments have been seen before, the high resolution of Herschel
has allowed astronomers to measure their widths for the first
time. It is unusual in astronomy for objects to have a fixed
size – planets stars and galaxies all come in a wide range of
sizes – so it was expected that the