A new way to feed baby stars

For the first time, we have observed a conveyor belt from the outskirts of a star-forming dense cloud directly depositing material near a pair of young forming stars. The gas motions in the conveyor belt, dubbed a 'streamer', mainly obey the gravitational pull from the innermost part of the core. The streamer delivers a large amount of gas with chemicals recently produced in the larger mother cloud directly to the young protostars. These results are striking evidence that the large-scale environment around forming stars has an important influence on small-scale disk formation and evolution.