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    Stars: Star Formation

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    Anthony Lopez
    Stars are born within clouds of dust and gas throughout most galaxies. As the cloud collapses under its own gravity, the material at the center heats up to form a protostar. Over time, this protostar develops into a main sequence star that will spend millions to billions of years fusing hydrogen into helium in its core. Main sequence stars come in a wide range of sizes, from small, long-lived red dwarfs to massive, short-lived hypergiants that are over 100 times the size of our Sun.

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    Stars: Star Formation

    Uploaded by

    Anthony Lopez
    14 views3 pages
    Stars are born within clouds of dust and gas throughout most galaxies. As the cloud collapses under its own gravity, the material at the center heats up to form a protostar. Over time, this protostar develops into a main sequence star that will spend millions to billions of years fusing hydrogen into helium in its core. Main sequence stars come in a wide range of sizes, from small, long-lived red dwarfs to massive, short-lived hypergiants that are over 100 times the size of our Sun.

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    Stars1

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    Stars are born within clouds of dust and gas throughout most galaxies. As the cloud collapses under its own gravity, the material at the center heats up to form a protostar. Over time, this protostar develops into a main sequence star that will spend millions to billions of years fusing hydrogen into helium in its core. Main sequence stars come in a wide range of sizes, from small, long-lived red dwarfs to massive, short-lived hypergiants that are over 100 times the size of our Sun.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    14 views3 pages

    Stars: Star Formation

    Uploaded by

    Anthony Lopez
    Stars are born within clouds of dust and gas throughout most galaxies. As the cloud collapses under its own gravity, the material at the center heats up to form a protostar. Over time, this protostar develops into a main sequence star that will spend millions to billions of years fusing hydrogen into helium in its core. Main sequence stars come in a wide range of sizes, from small, long-lived red dwarfs to massive, short-lived hypergiants that are over 100 times the size of our Sun.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
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    Stars

    Stars are the most widely recognized astronomical objects, and represent the most
    fundamental building blocks of galaxies. The age, distribution, and composition of the
    stars in a galaxy trace the history, dynamics, and evolution of that galaxy. Moreover,
    stars are responsible for the manufacture and distribution of heavy elements such as
    carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, and their characteristics are intimately tied to the
    characteristics of the planetary systems that may coalesce about them. Consequently,
    the study of the birth, life, and death of stars is central to the field of astronomy.

    Star Formation

    Stars are born within the clouds of dust and scattered throughout most galaxies. A
    familiar example of such as a dust cloud is the Orion Nebula. Turbulence deep within
    these clouds gives rise to knots with sufficient mass that the gas and dust can begin to
    collapse under its own gravitational attraction. As the cloud collapses, the material at
    the center begins to heat up. Known as a protostar, it is this hot core at the heart of the
    collapsing cloud that will one day become a star. Three-dimensional computer models
    of star formation predict that the spinning clouds of collapsing gas and dust may break
    up into two or three blobs; this would explain why the majority the stars in the Milky Way
    are paired or in groups of multiple stars.

    Powerful Stellar Eruption 


    The observations of Eta Carinae's light echo are providing new insight into the behavior of powerful massive stars on the brink
    of detonation.
    Credit: NOAO, AURA, NSF, and N. Smith (University of Arizona)
    As the cloud collapses, a dense, hot core forms and begins gathering dust and gas. Not
    all of this material ends up as part of a star — the remaining dust can become planets,
    asteroids, or comets or may remain as dust.

    In some cases, the cloud may not collapse at a steady pace. In January 2004, an
    amateur astronomer, James McNeil, discovered a small nebula that appeared
    unexpectedly near the nebula Messier 78, in the constellation of Orion. When observers
    around the world pointed their instruments at McNeil's Nebula, they found something
    interesting — its brightness appears to vary. Observations with NASA's Chandra X-ray
    Observatory provided a likely explanation: the interaction between the young star's
    magnetic field and the surrounding gas causes episodic increases in brightness.
    Main Sequence Stars

    A star the size of our Sun requires about 50 million years to mature from the beginning
    of the collapse to adulthood. Our Sun will stay in this mature phase (on the main
    sequence as shown in the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram) for approximately 10 billion
    years.

    Stars are fueled by the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to form helium deep in their interiors.
    The outflow of energy from the central regions of the star provides the pressure
    necessary to keep the star from collapsing under its own weight, and the energy by
    which it shines.

    As shown in the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram, Main Sequence stars span a wide range


    of luminosities and colors, and can be classified according to those characteristics. The
    smallest stars, known as red dwarfs, may contain as little as 10% the mass of the Sun
    and emit only 0.01% as much energy, glowing feebly at temperatures between 3000-
    4000K. Despite their diminutive nature, red dwarfs are by far the most numerous stars
    in the Universe and have lifespans of tens of billions of years.

    On the other hand, the most massive stars, known as hypergiants, may be 100 or more
    times more massive than the Sun, and have surface temperatures of more than 30,000
    K. Hypergiants emit hundreds of thousands of times more energy than the Sun, but
    have lifetimes of only a few million years. Although extreme stars such as these are
    believed to have been common in the early Universe, today they are extremely rare -
    the entire Milky Way galaxy contains only a handful of hypergiants.

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