By Ron Cowen
Peeking into the dusty core of a dark cloud seemingly devoid of stars, astronomers have found a faintly glowing body that could be the earliest glimmerings ever recorded from a newborn star. If the object, spied by the infrared eye of the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope, is indeed a fledgling star, it’s the least massive star ever observed. It weighs in at less than one-thousandth the mass of the sun.
![](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2004/11/4542.jpg?resize=300%2C250&ssl=1)
Astronomers aren’t certain how to classify the object, which resides 6,000 light-years from Earth in a dense core of gas and dust. The body may someday accumulate enough gas and dust to become a bona fide star. Another possibility is that the supply of material will run out before the object can achieve starhood, and it will become a brown dwarf instead, says Neal J. Evans of the University of Texas at Austin. It’s also possible that the object is neither star nor brown dwarf, but something more exotic, he adds.