The Milky Way and our galactic neighbourhood are anything but haphazard collections of stars. Instead, stars and galaxies seem to follow a clear pattern, which, seen from a naturalistic viewpoint, is a big mystery:
“Stars are formed in a variety of masses, and that distribution follows a well-known relation that’s observed everywhere we look, which is kind of odd and we’re not exactly sure why stars follow that relation,” New Scientist quotes Don Figer at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York as saying.