Nature's recipe for building new worlds: a zest of magnetic fields?

How do stars like the Sun form? How are planetary systems born? To answer these questions, astrophysicists need to find out Nature's recipe to turn vast cosmic clouds of gas into accretion discs and into stars and planets. One of the crucial ingredients in this recipe is likely magnetic fields. An international team of astrophysicists has just succeeded at mapping the large arches and funnels that magnetic fields weave between baby stars and their accretion discs. These observations should yield more accurate models of how new-born stars interact with their accretion disc to form planetary systems such as our own.