Bok globules are still a subject of intense research.

Over half the known Bok globules have been found to contain newly forming stars.

The Bok globules are typically up to a light year across and contain a few solar masses.

Isolated small dark nebulae are called Bok globules.

Bok globules are dark clouds of dense cosmic dust and gas in which star formation sometimes takes place.

"A fine example of a Bok globule," said Barnett.

They are typically observed near Bok globules (dark nebulae which contain very young stars) and often emanate from them.

"They are called Bok globules.

Bok globules were first observed by astronomer Bart Bok in the 1940s.

Isolated gravitationally-bound small molecular clouds with masses less than a few hundred times that of the Sun are called Bok globules.

If they can capture enough mass, they have the potential of creating stars in their cores; however, not all Bok globules will form stars.

Further observations have revealed that some Bok globules contain embedded warm sources, some contain Herbig-Haro objects, and some show outflows of molecular gas.

A more compact site of star formation is the opaque clouds of dense gas and dust known as Bok globules; so named after the astronomer Bart Bok.

But for years astronomers have been observing the birthplace of this particular star, an interstellar gas cloud of a type, called a Bok globule, that is often the site of star formation.

It has since been detected in a large variety of interstellar environments, including dense molecular clouds, bok globules, star forming regions, the shells around carbon-rich evolved stars, and even in other galaxies.

The Hubble Space Telescope image on the right is a close up of a set of Bok globules discovered in IC 2944 by South African astronomer A. David Thackeray in 1950.

Approximately 17,000 Bok globules were discovered in the nebula nine years later as a part of the Palomar Sky Survey; studies later showed that Bok's hypothesis that the globules held protostars was correct.

The nebula contains a number of Bok globules (dark, collapsing clouds of protostellar material), the most prominent of which have been catalogued by E. E. Barnard as B88, B89 and B296.

It is one of the Bok globules, named after Dr. Bart J. Bok, the late Dutch-American astronomer who in 1947 was one of the first to point out their potential role as star-formation sites.

It's so big that it could take shape with a single companion, out of a Bok globule, rather than as part of a cluster within a nebula - a type 0 supergiant, fifty thousand times as luminous as Sol.

Barnard 68 is a molecular cloud, dark absorption nebula or Bok globule, towards the southern constellation Ophiuchus and well within our own galaxy at a distance of about 500 light-years, so close that not a single star can be seen between it and the Sun.

It is now thought that a typical Bok globule contains about 10 solar masses of material in a region about a light-year or so across, and that Bok globules most commonly result in the formation of double or multiple star systems.