Clouds need two essential ingredients to form, and both must be present simultaneously for the process to begin. There are two ingredients needed for clouds to form: water and nuclei. The first ...

Molecular clouds are vast reservoirs of cold gas in which stars form through a complex interplay of supersonic turbulence, self-gravity, magnetic fields and stellar feedback. Turbulent motions within ...

Molecular clouds constitute the principal reservoirs of cold, dense gas in the Milky Way, with masses ranging from tens to millions of solar masses. Predominantly composed of molecular hydrogen, they ...

Marine bacteria carried by warm and moisture-laden atmospheric rivers contribute to the formation of ice clouds at unexpectedly high temperatures in high-latitude regions, research from Japan suggests ...

Astronomers have captured new, detailed maps of three nearby interstellar gas clouds containing regions of ongoing high-mass star formation. The results of this survey, called the Star Formation ...

Clouds form when water vapor — an invisible gas in the atmosphere — sticks to tiny floating particles, such as dust, and turns into liquid water droplets or ice crystals. In a newly published study, ...

Tiny particles bubbling up from the tops of melting sea ice into the Arctic sky may be a key, understudied element of cloud formation in that climate-sensitive region. Ice-nucleating particles can ...

Is it a flying elephant? A gingerbread man? When I was little, I used to search the clouds for amusing shapes as they drifted across the sky and imagine stories about their patterns. Now I'm a ...

Miriam Freedman (left), professor of chemistry at Penn State, and Heidi Busse, a graduate student at Penn State, studied the freezing activity of four different types of microplastics to see how they ...

When a volcano erupts, it can spew ash high into the atmosphere—inserting aerosols right where clouds typically form. How exactly these aerosols impact cloud formation has long been a mystery to ...