Astronomers have found some of the youngest stars ever seen, thanks to the Herschel space observatory. Dense envelopes of gas and dust surround the fledgling stars known as protostars, making their detection difficult. The 15 newly observed protostars turned up by surprise in a survey of the biggest site of star formation near our solar system, located in the constellation Orion. The discovery gives scientists a peek into one of the earliest and least understood phases of star formation.