Buried in a declassified CIA translation of a 1949 issue of the Soviet newspaper Kommunist is a report on a young observatory perched 1,500 meters above sea level in Armenia — and a discovery that quietly upended the origin story of the universe.

In 1947–48, V. A. Ambartsumyan discovered the existence of new stellar systems forming the Galaxy. This discovery brought about an important change in our conception of the origin of stars and of celestial bodies in general. Many idealistic astrophysicists assumed that all stars composing the Galaxy were formed in some very remote epoch billions of years ago, and that, at present, star-forming processes are no longer occurring. The discovery of stellar associations appeared as evidence of the existence of isolated groups of young stars formed from other, formerly unknown heavenly bodies -- the so-called protostars (protozvezd).

The document is a CIA intelligence digest — Cold War analysts scanning Soviet newspapers for anything that hinted at the USSR's scientific capabilities. What they captured, without perhaps realizing it, was the announcement of one of the most important astronomical ideas of the 20th century.

Viktor Ambartsumyan, working at the newly built Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory in Soviet Armenia, had noticed something strange: certain loose groupings of hot, luminous O- and B-type stars were flying apart from each other so quickly that they could only have formed together within the last few million years — cosmic yesterday. In a Galaxy supposedly 10 billion years old, this was impossible unless star formation was still happening right now.

At the time, this was heretical. The dominant Western view was that stars had all condensed from primordial gas in the distant past. Ambartsumyan's "stellar associations" showed the opposite: the Galaxy was, and is, a maternity ward.

He was right. Modern astronomy has completely vindicated him:

• Every image the Hubble and James Webb telescopes have returned of the Orion Nebula, the Eagle Nebula's "Pillars of Creation," or the Carina Nebula shows exactly what Ambartsumyan predicted — protostars condensing out of gas clouds in real time.
• His term "stellar association" is still the standard technical term in astronomy today (OB associations, T associations).
• The Byurakan Observatory he helped found is still operating.

The propaganda flourish in the CIA excerpt — "the discovery of these stellar associations proves the point of view of Soviet cosmogonical science" — is almost funny in retrospect. Soviet dialectical materialism happened to insist the universe was in perpetual change and renewal, which put ideological pressure on Soviet astronomers to look for exactly this kind of ongoing process. In this case, ideology and reality lined up. Ambartsumyan looked for continuous creation because his political system demanded it, and the sky obliged.

When you next see a Webb Telescope image of a newborn star punching through a dust cloud, remember: an Armenian astronomer told us that was happening in 1947, using nothing more than the proper motions of a few dozen blue stars — and a CIA analyst quietly filed it away as unevaluated information.