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The W51 nebula in Aquila - one of the largest star factories in the Milky Way (August 25, 2020). Star formation is the process by which dense regions within molecular clouds in interstellar space, sometimes referred to as "stellar nurseries" or "star-forming regions", collapse and form stars. [1]
During gravitational collapse density always increases, [12] thus in the second case the Jeans mass will decrease during collapse, allowing smaller overdense regions to collapse, leading to fragmentation of the giant molecular cloud. For an ideal monatomic gas, the adiabatic index is 5/3.
A molecular cloud, sometimes called a stellar nursery (if star formation is occurring within), is a type of interstellar cloud, the density and size of which permit absorption nebulae, the formation of molecules (most commonly molecular hydrogen, H 2), and the formation of H II regions.
Stellar evolution starts with the gravitational collapse of a giant molecular cloud. Typical giant molecular clouds are roughly 100 light-years (9.5 × 10 14 km) across and contain up to 6,000,000 solar masses (1.2 × 10 37 kg). As it collapses, a giant molecular cloud breaks into smaller and smaller pieces.
The phase begins when a molecular cloud fragment first collapses under the force of self-gravity and an opaque, pressure-supported core forms inside the collapsing fragment. It ends when the infalling gas is depleted, leaving a pre-main-sequence star , which contracts to later become a main-sequence star at the onset of hydrogen fusion ...
A new study proposes that the dinosaurs were killed off due to severe global cooling caused when the Earth passed through a ‘giant molecular cloud.’
The free-fall time is the characteristic time that would take a body to collapse under its own gravitational attraction, if no other forces existed to oppose the collapse.. As such, it plays a fundamental role in setting the timescale for a wide variety of astrophysical processes—from star formation to helioseismology to supernovae—in which gravity plays a dominant ro
Barnard 68's well-defined edges and other features show that it is on the verge of gravitational collapse followed by becoming a star within the next 200,000 years or so. [9] The cloud is often confused with the Boötes Void, although the two have nothing in common. Pictures of Barnard 68 are often erroneously used to illustrate articles about ...