Why some stars are born alone

A few lucky stars in spiral galaxies belong to beautiful clusters of young stars, but most roam the
galaxy alone or with just a partner or two. Now, as astronomers will report in the Monthly
Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a star's chances of being born in a cluster depend on
how close it is to the galaxy's center. The researchers mapped thousands of star clusters in the
attractive barred spiral galaxy M83 (shown), 15 million light-years from Earth, finding that the
percentage of young stars in clusters declines from the urban core to the suburbs: Four thousand
light-years from M83's center, 19% of young stars belong to clusters, whereas 13,000 light-years
out, just 7% do. This trend may arise because starmaking molecular gas abounds in the inner
regions of a spiral galaxy's disk, increasing the gas pressure and the chances of cluster formation.
M83 is the first galaxy in which astronomers have discovered this trend, but other spirals likely
follow the same pattern, tooincluding the Milky Way, the one galaxy we can't see from the
outside.