Stars don't start out fully formed. Instead, they begin when clouds of diffuse gas and dust clump together, becoming denser than their surroundings. Gravity does the rest, pulling material inward until a collapsing knot becomes a compact, warming core: a protostar, still feeding on the cloud that created it.
That's exactly what was seen in a recent image from NASA's and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope, as the star-forming region known as NGC-1333 hosts a protostar as well as other young stellar objects.
