Astronomers are on "Cloud 9" with a new, starless gas cloud

"Out there, in the vast Universe, are clumps of matter that come in many different sizes and masses. We might be most familiar with galaxies like our Milky Way: with hundreds of billions of solar masses worth of stars, even more gas and plasma, and more than a trillion solar masses worth of dark matter. At smaller masses, however, it takes longer, and becomes more and more difficult, for clouds of normal matter to collapse."

"That's the idea behind what astronomers call a RELHIC: a Reionization-Limited HI Cloud, or a cloud of neutral hydrogen found within a more massive dark matter halo that's in thermal equilibrium with the cosmic ultraviolet background. Although starless gas clouds have been found before, they: are usually rotating, indicating the presence of a collapsed disk, are typically high in mass, of around 100 million solar masses or more,"

Clumps of matter across the Universe span wide mass ranges, and low-mass baryonic clouds often fail to collapse into stars because collapse becomes slower and more difficult. A RELHIC is a neutral-hydrogen cloud inside a dark-matter halo held in thermal equilibrium with the cosmic ultraviolet background, preventing star formation. Previously found starless gas clouds tend to be rotating, massive (around 100 million solar masses), and only weakly constrained to be truly starless. Cloud 9 is a newly identified, starless gas cloud near Messier 94 (16 million light-years) with deep Hubble imaging, making it a strong candidate RELHIC.

Read at Big Think