Star-birth myth 'busted' An international team of researchers has debunked one of astronomy's long held beliefs about how stars are formed, using a set of galaxies found with CSIROs Parkes radio telescope. When a cloud of interstellar gas collapses to form stars, the stars range from massive to minute. Since the 1950s astronomers have thought that in a family of new-born stars the ratio of massive stars to lighter ones was always pretty much the same - for instance, that for every star 20 times more massive than the Sun or larger, youd get 500 stars the mass of the Sun or less.