How Often Are New Stars Born in the Milky Way?

Stellar nurseries can be found in giant clouds of molecular gas and dust scattered throughout our galaxy. The Octo-mom has nothing on these stellar nurseries, as these regions can produce multiple stars at once – into the hundreds at a time. How often does this happen? On average, one new star is born somewhere in our Milky Way galaxy per year, astronomers estimate. But with the newborns arriving together in dense clusters, stars aren't born, or created, very often in the Milky Way. Recently, astronomers took a close look in infrared at what was happening inside a giant stellar nursery called RCW 38 and saw hundreds of stars in different stages of development. What they found was significant, as this represents the first time a massive cluster other than the one in the Orion Nebula has been studied so precisely.
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