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An interstellar cloud is generally an accumulation of gas, plasma, and dust in our and other galaxies. But differently, an interstellar cloud is a denser-than-average region of the interstellar medium , the matter and radiation that exists in the space between the star systems in a galaxy.
The fragments now condense into rotating spheres of gas that serve as stellar embryos. [25] Complicating this picture of a collapsing cloud are the effects of turbulence, macroscopic flows, rotation, magnetic fields and the cloud geometry. Both rotation and magnetic fields can hinder the collapse of a cloud.
The various planets are thought to have formed from the solar nebula, the disc-shaped cloud of gas and dust left over from the Sun's formation. [37] The currently accepted method by which the planets formed is accretion, in which the planets began as dust grains in orbit around the central protostar.
Molecular clouds typically have interstellar medium densities of 10 to 30 cm −3, and constitute approximately 50% of the total interstellar gas in a galaxy. [11] Most of the gas is found in a molecular state. The visual boundaries of a molecular cloud is not where the cloud effectively ends, but where molecular gas changes to atomic gas in a ...
Examples of the former case are giant molecular clouds, the coldest, densest phase of interstellar gas, which can form by the cooling and condensation of more diffuse gas. Examples of the latter case are planetary nebulae formed from material shed by a star in late stages of its stellar evolution .
The amount of gas a super-Earth that formed in situ acquires may depend on when the planetary embryos merged due to giant impacts relative to the dissipation of the gas disk. If the mergers happen after the gas disk dissipates terrestrial planets can form, if in a transition disk a super-Earth with a gas envelope containing a few percent of its ...
Map showing the Sun located near the edge of the Local Interstellar Cloud and Alpha Centauri about 4 light-years away in the neighboring G-Cloud complex Interstellar medium and astrosphere meeting. Astronomers describe the ISM as turbulent, meaning that the gas has quasi-random motions coherent over a large range of spatial scales.
In astronomy, Bok globules are isolated and relatively small dark nebulae containing dense cosmic dust and gas from which star formation may take place. Bok globules are found within H II regions, and typically have a mass of about two [1] to 50 solar masses contained within a region about a light year or so across (about 4.5 × 10 47 m 3). [2]