CAFFEINE Survey Gives Astronomers "a Latte" to Think About | ESO

CAFFEINE Survey Gives Astronomers "a Latte" to Think About | ESO

Creating a star is hard work, and the process is not very efficient. Current knowledge suggests that a stellar nursery must have a minimum density of gas and dust for a star to form. Only 1-2% of all the gas and dust in these clouds is utilized to ignite a star. Could even denser regions be more efficient at forming stars?

[Note: a latte is a type of coffee made with espresso and hot steamed milk, milkier than a cappuccino.]

In this picture, we are looking at GAL316, one of the many stellar nurseries a team of astronomers observed to answer this question. This region is part of a survey called CAFFEINE—an astronomer’s best friend—carried out using the ArTéMiS camera at the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), a radio-telescope in the Chajnantor plateau. Now operated by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, this telescope captures the faint glow of cold gas clouds, seen here as a blue glow. This glow has been overlaid on a starry background captured with the European Southern Observatory’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) telescope. GAL316 is a star-forming region located approximately 11,400 light-years away in the constellation Compass.

Results from the study show that, unlike astronomers that can become more efficient with a bit of caffeine, the densest regions observed with this CAFFEINE survey seemed no more efficient at producing stars than any other stellar nursery above the minimum density.

Image Description: A blue filamentary cloud across a backdrop of thousands of stars.

VISTA Telescope
https://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/paranal/telescopes/vista.html

Learn more about APEX
https://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/apex/

Read science paper "Understanding the star formation efficiency in dense gas: Initial results from the CAFFEINE survey with ArTéMiS⋆"
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2024/08/aa49908-24.pdf

Credit: ESO/M. Mattern, P. André et al. Background: VVV
Release Date: Jan. 5, 2026

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