One of the main scientific goals of the Herschel Gould Belt survey is to elucidate the physical mechanisms responsible for the formation and evolution of prestellar cores in molecular clouds. In the ~11 deg2 field of Aquila imaged with Herschel/PACS-SPIRE at 70–500 μm, we have identified a complete sample of 651 starless cores, 446 of them are gravitationally-bound candidate prestellar cores. Our Herschel observations also provide an unprecedented census of filaments in the Aquila cloud and suggest an intimate connection between these filaments and the formation process of prestellar cores. Indeed, a strong correlation is found between their spatial distributions. These Herschel findings support a filamentary paradigm for the early stages of star formation, where the cores result from the gravitational fragmentation of the densest filaments.

Recent surveys at infrared and submillimeter wavelengths with the Spitzer and Herschel space observatories suggest that star formation in dense molecular gas is governed by essentially the same “laws” in nearby Galactic clouds and distant external galaxies. This raises the possibility of a unified picture for star formation in the Universe from individual-cloud scales to galaxy–wide scales. We summarize the star formation scenario favored by Herschel studies of the nearest molecular clouds of the Galaxy which point to the key role of the quasi-universal filamentary structure pervading the cold interstellar medium.