Star birth appears to drive galactic gas cloud formation

Ars Technica : The visible matter that makes up galaxies is primarily in the form of stars, but many galaxies have large clouds of molecular gas around them. How that gas got there is unclear because most theories about galaxy formation predict that the gas should have stayed in the galaxies and coalesced into stars. Now observations of a distant galaxy may provide some clues into the process. The observed galaxy, J0905, is extremely compact, with half of its star formation coming from a region just 100 parsecs in diameter. It is spewing gas outwards into space at a flow rate of 2 500 km/s, 10 times more than the average for other galaxies. Curiously, the mass of the gas lost each year is roughly equal to the mass of new stars that J0905 produces each year. Because of the galaxy’s compactness, the combined radiation from the new stars appears to be the source of the “wind” driving the gas out of the galaxy.