the.com/interstellar medium
The messy gas and dust between stars, quietly building the next ones.
means The thin soup of gas, dust, and plasma that fills the space between stars within a galaxy, far from empty despite its extreme sparseness.
from Straightforward Latin scaffolding: 'inter' (between) plus 'stellaris' (of the stars, from stella, star), joined to 'medium' — a substance something travels through or exists within, from Latin medius, middle. Astronomers started using the phrase in the 19th and 20th centuries as telescopes and spectroscopy revealed that the dark gaps between stars weren't true vacuum but were laced with diffuse matter — the leftover material from old stars and the raw stock for new ones.
- density
- about one atom per cubic centimeter, mostly empty
- composition
- ninety nine percent gas, one percent dust
- star nursery
- collapses under gravity to birth new stars
- recycling
- made from the remains of dead stars