A major scientific discovery that drastically revises the established views of astrophysicists on how Suns are created in the Milky Way, was published on 10 January 2025 in the prestigious international scientific journal “Nature Astronomy”.

The new scientific data were brought to light by an international research team, in which the Associate Professor of the Department of Physics of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Pantelis Papadopoulos, participated. The contribution of Mr. Papadopoulos, who is a member of the Palaeolithic Institute of Physics, has been made by Mr. Pallas Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos’ contribution was crucial, as he was the main person responsible for the theoretical analysis of the data from the IRAM 30-meter radio telescope at Pico Veleta, Spain, and from ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array), with 64 radio telescopes operating synchronously as one, at 5100 meters altitude in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, and constituting the largest and most sensitive array of radio telescopes on Earth.

The telescopes were able to detect giant clouds of molecular hydrogen at the farthest reaches of the Milky Way and even in the Magellanic Clouds, two smaller satellite galaxies around our own, visible only from the Southern Hemisphere, which proved crucial to this scientific discovery. The very faint radio waves from the farthest outer parts of the Milky Way galaxy, some 65 thousand light years away from our own star, the Sun, provided valuable images and information about the larger gas masses present in every galaxy, not just our own. These are the so-called Giant Molecular Hydrogen Clouds, each with a typical mass equivalent to a million Suns many times over.

These clouds of molecular hydrogen are so cold (-250 C) that they emit no visible light at all, only faint radio waves from the molecules they contain. When these clouds collapse, due to their gravity, they create the stars in the galaxies in the Universe, they are the matrices of stellar worlds deep in the Milky Way’s Timeline.

About 4.5 billion years ago, such a cloud was responsible for the creation of our own star, the Sun, and the remnants of this gravitational collapse and asterogenesis became the planets. But contrary to what researchers expected, the Giant Molecular Clouds in the farthest reaches of the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds were not in a state of imminent gravitational collapse, as the standard picture that had been formed after decades of observational research and theoretical studies of their physics and thermodynamics using supercomputers demanded. Instead, they were in a state as if some unknown but powerful factor was holding them back.

The analysis of Associate Professor Pantelis Papadopoulos, using a well-known theorem of statistical physics and thermodynamics, the virial theorem, showed this factor to be the magnetic field of the Milky Way, whose dynamical lines penetrate these giant hydrogen clouds.

Until the team’s publication in Nature Astronomy, these dynamical lines of the galactic magnetic field were thought to be too weak to so decisively regulate the collapse of these giant clouds. Combined with an earlier major study by the team published in Nature January 2018 (www.auth.gr/press/2556), the current research opens up new horizons in astrophysics theories of asterogenesis in the Universe. The scientific team also included Dr. Thomas Bisbas, an expert in Astrochemistry, and a graduate of the Department of Physics of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, who is currently working at the Zhejiang Astronomical Computation Research Center in Hangzhou Province, China.

“With these two important research results, in 2018 and 2025, the research community is now facing a new era of research on how Suns are created in the Universe,” Papadopoulos said.

The title of the article is “Inadequate turbulent support in low-metallicity molecular clouds” and is available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02440-3