If you are in the northern hemisphere and raise your eyes to the sky in an early evening during the winter season you could look for the Orion constellation, easily recognizable by its shape.

If you have a binocular and search carefully midway down the sword of Orion, you will notice a bright and extended fog, with a nebular appearance: you are looking at the Orion Nebula, discovered in 1610 by Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, and for your information you are peeking in a stellar nursery, a place where new stars are forming. Yes, you read it correctly, there are regions in the universe that are actually forming stars as we speak.

Stars are not immutable as they appear when we look at them during the night, but they are transient objects that constantly form, release energy through nuclear reactions in their interiors and, finally, die, dispersing in the universe a material enriched by the products of these reaction. Such an enriched material become part of large clouds of interstellar gas and dust, which can eventually collapse under the action of gravity and form a new generation of stars, starting the cycle again. This cycle is continuously happening and will only stop when (and if) the expanding universe will be too sparse for gravity to effectively pull material together. Star formation is, therefore, one of the processes involved in the entire evolution of the universe since its beginning.