A team led by Technion physicist Prof. Shmuel Bialy has accomplished what the scientific community long dismissed as impossible: directly measuring cosmic rays deep inside a dark nebula 400 light-years from Earth. The breakthrough, published Wednesday in Nature Astronomy, reveals the mechanics behind stellar birth and confirms the biblical understanding that star creation is not a completed past event but an ongoing process. The Bible describes God creating “the stars” on the fourth day of creation using a grammatical structure that the Sages interpreted as indicating continuous formation. By transforming massive interstellar clouds into natural particle detectors, Israeli scientists have now observed this process in action.
Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the Israeli-led international team detected infrared radiation from cosmic ray particles penetrating Barnard 68, a cold, dense nebula in the constellation Ophiuchus. The discovery confirms a theoretical prediction that researchers had considered observationally inaccessible for decades.
When cosmic ray particles—which, despite their name, are not radiation but actual matter (protons, electrons, and atomic nuclei) racing through the galaxy at nearly the speed of light—slam into a nebula, they penetrate all the way through. These high-energy collisions cause hydrogen molecules inside the cloud to vibrate, emitting infrared radiation at a characteristic frequency of about 100 terahertz. The James Webb Space Telescope detected this signature.
“Nobody thought it would be possible to observe these cosmic rays because they were never seen before,” Bialy told The Times of Israel. “Now, we show that it’s possible. We were the first to observe it, and the signal was strong and clear.”
The cosmic-ray ionization rate—a fundamental parameter that drives interstellar chemistry, sets gas temperatures, and enables coupling to magnetic fields—has never been directly measured. Astrophysicists have relied on indirect chemical tracers and uncertain assumptions. This measurement changes that, effectively turning molecular clouds into light-year-sized cosmic ray detectors.
Barnard 68 spans roughly one-third of a light-year and has a mass twice that of the Sun. Inside this frigid environment—temperatures hover around 10-20 Kelvin, barely above absolute zero—cosmic rays drive the formation of molecules, including water, ammonia, and methanol. The particles also heat the nebular gas, delaying gravitational collapse and influencing when and how efficiently stars form.
The Bible describes the fourth day of creation: “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars” (vayaas et hakochavim). (Genesis 1:14-16).
The Sages noted a grammatical distinction in the Hebrew text. For the sun and moon, the Bible uses the complete verb vayaas (“and He made”), indicating finished acts of creation. But for the stars, the text simply states v’et hakochavim—”and the stars”—without the verb. This construction led the Sages to understand that stellar creation was not completed on the fourth day. The discovery that cosmic rays regulate the formation of new stars from dying stellar matter confirms this ancient interpretation. The universe creates new stars through a self-sustaining cycle where stellar death provides the very particles that enable stellar birth. What the Sages derived from grammatical analysis, modern astrophysics now observes directly.
Cosmic rays originate primarily from supernova explosions, the shockwaves of dying stars that scatter energetic particles throughout galactic space. These particles then influence the very clouds where new stars will form, heating dense molecular gas and ionizing atoms that drive chemical processes. Stars like our Sun emerged from such clouds billions of years ago.
Bialy spent years during the COVID-19 pandemic working through the theoretical calculations, even when the observational community insisted the signals would be too faint to detect. “I just kept on going because I enjoyed the process of doing the equations, calculating everything,” he said. “I thought that even if we never observe it, I’m having fun.”
During his postdoctoral work at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Bialy shared his calculations with Italian astronomer Sirio Belli, whose specialty was observing infrared radiation. The two set up a telescope at an Arizona observatory, exposing for 20 hours. They saw nothing.
The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in December 2021 and orbiting the Sun 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, proved sensitive enough. NASA receives ten proposals for every one it approves. After several attempts, Bialy’s team secured eight hours of observation time.
“The signals detected by the space telescope matched perfectly with the predictions of the theoretical model we developed,” said Amit Chemke, a master’s student in Bialy’s group and co-author of the study. “We also examined alternative models, but none fit the observed signals. Our measurement provides unequivocal evidence that we are seeing cosmic rays.”
David Neufeld, professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University and part of the research team, said the data “has opened a completely new window on cosmic-ray astrophysics.”
NASA has now allocated an additional 50 hours of observational time. “This will enable us to effectively measure the intensity of cosmic rays in many places in the galaxy,” Bialy said. “And ultimately, in the years to come, we plan to extend it even further, maybe to many tens of nebulae around us, to measure the distribution of cosmic rays throughout galactic space.”
The research reveals cosmic rays not as mere byproducts of stellar death but as active agents in the ongoing creative process described in Genesis. These particles regulate star formation and connect the death of old stars to the birth of new ones. Barnard 68 itself will collapse in approximately 200,000 years, forming a new star. Israeli scientists have not merely discovered a mechanism of star formation—they have witnessed the perpetual renewal of creation itself, precisely as the Sages understood from the Hebrew text millennia ago.