Posted by Bruce McClure, August 20, 2025 here.
The Great Rift is the name for a long swath of gaseous clouds, darkening a stretch of the starry band of the Milky Way in our sky.
The Milky Way is the edgewise view into our home galaxy. It has an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars. So why is this area dark? It’s a region of vast star-forming clouds.
You need a dark sky to see the Great Rift. But if you do see it, know that new stars are being born there, shrouded in their gas-and-dust cocoons.
The Great Rift is dark due to dust – Stars are formed from great clouds of gas and dust in our Milky Way galaxy and other galaxies. When we look up at the starry band of the Milky Way and see the Great Rift, we are looking into our galaxy’s star-forming regions. Imagine the vast number of new stars that will emerge, in time, from these clouds of dust.
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