H II regions are star-forming regions, places where stars are being born. It is very common to see such a nebula with flocks of hot, young stars within it. Those nebulas may be referred to asreflection nebulassince their clouds of gas and dust are illuminated by—or reflect—the light g...
Stars are born when giantcloudsof gas and dust collapse. Whenever one of the collapsing regions becomes hot and dense enough for nuclear fusion to set in, a star is born. For massive stars, i.e. those stars that exhibit more than eight times the mass of the Sun, that is only part of...
Molecular cloudsare massive clouds of gas and dust out of which stars form. They’re called molecular clouds because they’re mostly molecular hydrogen, though they can contain many different compounds. Though the clouds are filamentary in nature, they do form clumps of greater density that someti...
All stars are born in the collapse of molecular clouds, vast pockets of dust, gas, and ice in space. These clouds can be seen from Earth; an example is the famous Pillars of Creation, whiich are some four light-years in length.
In subject area: Physics and Astronomy Collapsing clouds refer to the process where a cloud of gas and dust undergoes gravitational collapse, leading to the formation of dense cores that eventually give rise to stars or stellar systems.
From gas and dust to protostars: addressing the initial stages of star formation using observations of nearby molecular clouds Though there has been a considerable amount of work investigating the earlystages of low-mass star formation in recent years, the general theory is only br... S Mairs ...
But in short: Dust (and more importantly, as Chris would tell us, gas) was fed from at least two dust lanes into the place where NGC 206 was born. Molecular hydrogen was clearly channeled into this particular region, and it set off an enormous and extremely widespread burst of star ...
Turn on any local TV weather forecast and you can get a map of where skies are blue or cloudy. But for scientists trying to figure out how clouds affect the Earth's environment, what's happening inside that shifting cloud cover is critical and hard to se
As it nibbles away at the gas and dust that surrounds it, we can imagine the cloud disappearing in slow-mo fashion to become part of the young star, LkHa 259. I cropped the image to leave in three bright 11th- and 12th-magnitude stars that help in finding the object. ...
Where did all the stars go? What used to be considered a hole in the sky is now known to astronomers as a dark molecular cloud. Here, a high concentration of dust and molecular gas absorb practically all the visible light emitted from background stars. The eerily dark surroundings help mak...