Astronomers used the HiPERCAM camera on the Gran Telescopio Canarias to take ultra-deep images of Cloud-9, a gas cloud near spiral galaxy M94. The observations found no trace of stars in the central region, placing an upper limit of just 16,000 solar masses of stars within a vast area. With around 1 million solar masses of hydrogen gas, the object has at least 60 times more gas than stars (if any exist at all). The result supports the idea that Cloud-9 could be a rare system dominated by gas and dark matter that somehow failed to form stars, confirming a key prediction of standard cosmology.
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