The center of the Milky Way is already crowded with stars. But in a few million years, tens of thousands more could flare to life in a region known as the Brick. It’s a vast cloud of cold, dark gas and dust that’s shaped like a brick. The Brick may be the biggest future star cluster in the entire galaxy. It’s more than a hundred thousand times the mass of the Sun. And recent observations with a giant new radio telescope show that it contains at least 50 dense blobs of material — embryos that could be giving birth to stars even now. Stars are born when such blobs collapse under their own gravitational pull. As a blob collapses, it gets hotter. If it gets hot enough, nuclear fusion ignites at its center — giving birth to a star. There are indications that a few small stars have already formed in the Brick. But such giant clouds are also where big, heavy stars are born — stars that shine tens of thousands of times brighter than the Sun. It’s not certain that the Brick will give birth to m
