Portable Star Labs are used to to design new stars. This is done by firing randomly generated stars (up to a max of 60 per lab), and watchers designating a favourite star. They are available from Universities or Art at a rate of two per week, and anybody can claim one if there is one available. From each 7 labs returned to a UArt, one is randomly selected (weighted by the number of observers) and released to be available to learn.
KaBoom will buy full (60 shots remaining) star labs at a highly subsidised price!
Star Costs
The following page is very well maintained, and contains a list of current stars, locations and costs: