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Cancer, the Crab. Starry Night Software. The small faint constellation Cancer, the "crab," is rich in open clusters and double stars. [See our reference page about the constellation of Cancer.]
In observational astronomy, the patterns formed by their brightest stars help observers identify fainter constellations and find deep sky objects. Asterisms in constellations can be used to find the north and south celestial poles.
How are stars named? And what happens when they die? These star facts explain the science of the night sky.
Constellations can help you sort the twinkling dots scattered across the night sky. Connect the stars to see what deep-sky wonders emerge.
Happily, nature presents us with some help: the brightest stars in the sky appear to form groups, patterns imagined by our brain interpreting what our eyes are seeing.
As a branch of astronomy, star formation includes the study of the interstellar medium (ISM) and giant molecular clouds (GMC) as precursors to the star formation process, and the study of protostars and young stellar objects as its immediate products.
Star formation and the history of the cosmos. Galaxy cluster Abell 383 is a gravitational lens. This process bends and amplifies the light from faraway galaxies, letting astronomers study star formation in galaxies that would normally be too distant and too faint to see.
Star formation happens in interstellar molecular clouds: opaque clumps of very cold gas and dust. The process starts when some of those clumps reach a critical mass, allowing them to collapse under their own gravity.
It was a simple beginning: People noticed stars in the sky and named them. Then, they noticed patterns amongst the stars. They also saw objects moving across the backdrop of stars from night to night and called them "wanderers"—we now know them as planets.
Star formation takes place in swirling clouds of gas and dust that are many times larger than a typical solar system. Over time, a region within the cloud becomes denser than its surroundings. At this point, kicks in and the cloud starts to collapse in on itself. As the cloud shrinks, its centre (or core) becomes very hot and dense.