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"We don’t understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form." -Carlos Frenk The Universe has been around for a long time: nearly 14 billion years, to the best of our knowledge. When it was very young, there were absolutely zero stars in it, while today, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each of which contains anywhere from a few billion to many trillions of stars. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI / AURA) - ESA / Hubble Collaboration The galaxy shown above, NGC 2841, is very similar to our own Milky Way. Approximately the…