Debosmita Pathak was staring at data from a pair of colliding galaxies 100 million light-years away when she saw something extraordinary: the pressure inside their star-forming regions was 100 times greater than anything observed in galaxies like our own. As a graduate student at The Ohio State University, Pathak has helped lead a sweeping new study that peels back the veil on how young stars shape the evolution of galaxies, using observations of about 18,000 star-forming regions across nearby spiral galaxies. By combining data from the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array—part of the PHANGS survey—her team is revealing how stellar feedback, the energetic push from newborn massive stars, sculpts the cosmos on multiple scales.
This isn’t just about bright spots in space. When young stars ignite, they flood their surroundings with intense radiation, heating and ionizing gas, and driving powerful winds that can either trigger new star formation or tear apart the very clouds that birthed them. In normal galaxies like the Milky Way, which forms about one star per year, this process is relatively gentle. But in extreme environments like NGC 3256—a luminous starburst system born from a galactic merger—feedback pressures skyrocket. There, the gas is so turbulent and dense that the usual rules of star formation no longer apply.
Pathak’s team found that in Milky Way-like galaxies, pressure from ionized gas governs the expansion of star-forming regions. But in NGC 3256, the feedback is so strong that even as intense pressure confines the youngest star clusters, most are still powerful enough to keep expanding. This turbulence means the gas doesn’t settle into a calm, rotating disk—challenging long-held assumptions about how galaxies evolve. These are the first direct pressure measurements of their kind, offering a new benchmark for astrophysical models.
The implications ripple far beyond one galaxy. Understanding how star formation behaves in both typical and extreme environments helps scientists test whether the physical laws they’ve derived from our corner of the universe hold true across cosmic extremes. This summer, Pathak will continue her work at IPAC at Caltech as part of the GOALS collaboration, diving deeper into dusty, obscured regions where stars are born. Her findings, presented at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society and selected for a featured press conference, are already sparking interdisciplinary conversations. As she puts it, discovery isn’t just data—it’s a shared human adventure.