Bok globules
Glóbulos de Bok
- Date
- 1947 · confidence high
- Place
- Harvard College Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- Credited to
- Bart Bok and Edith F. Reilly
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
Bok and Reilly identified small, dense, isolated dark nebulae of dust and gas, and proposed that they collapsed under gravity to form stars and clusters. The hypothesis, hard to verify at the time, was confirmed in 1990 by near-infrared observations that revealed protostars inside them.
What it led to
- 1990 confirmation of star formation inside the globules via infrared observation
- Study of embedded protostellar sources and molecular outflows