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A protostar is a very young star that is still gathering mass from its parent molecular cloud. It is the earliest phase in the process of stellar evolution . [ 1 ] For a low-mass star (i.e. that of the Sun or lower), it lasts about 500,000 years. [ 2 ]
Earlier in its life, the object is a protostar that grows by acquiring mass from its surrounding envelope of interstellar dust and gas. After the protostar blows away this envelope, it is optically visible, and appears on the stellar birthline in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.
A more compact site of star formation is the opaque clouds of dense gas and dust known as Bok globules, so named after the astronomer Bart Bok. These can form in association with collapsing molecular clouds or possibly independently. [13] The Bok globules are typically up to a light-year across and contain a few solar masses. [14]
LRLL 54361 also known as L54361 is thought to be a binary protostar producing strobe-like flashes, located in the constellation Perseus in the star-forming region IC 348 and 950 light-years away. The object may offer insight into a star's early stages of formation, when large masses of gas and dust are falling into a newly forming binary star ...
The collapse releases gravitational energy, which heats up the protostar. This process occurs on the free fall timescale, which is roughly 100,000 years for solar-mass protostars, and ends when the protostar reaches approximately 4000 K. This is known as the Hayashi boundary, and at this point, the protostar is on the Hayashi track.
A star forms by accumulation of material that falls in to a protostar from a circumstellar disk or envelope. Material in the disk is cooler than the surface of the protostar, so it radiates at longer wavelengths of light producing excess infrared emission. As material in the disk is depleted, the infrared excess decreases.
There is evidence that the formation of the Solar System began about 4.6 billion years ago with the gravitational collapse of a small part of a giant molecular cloud. [1] Most of the collapsing mass collected in the center, forming the Sun , while the rest flattened into a protoplanetary disk out of which the planets , moons , asteroids , and ...
Pre-stellar cores are the nurseries of new stars, and are an early phase in the formation of low-mass stars, before gravitational collapse produces a central protostar.The spatial distribution of pre-stellar cores shows the history of their formation, and their sensitivity to the physics controlling their creation.