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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 visible-light (left) and infrared (right) views of the Trifid Nebula—a giant star-forming cloud of gas and dust located 5,400 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius Stars are thought to form inside giant clouds of cold molecular hydrogen — giant molecular clouds roughly 300,000 times the mass of the Sun ( M ☉ ) and 20 ...
Stars form by gravitational collapse of interstellar gas clouds. As the collapse increases the density, radiative energy loss decreases due to increased opacity. This raises the temperature of the cloud which prevents further collapse, and a hydrostatic equilibrium is established. Gas continues to fall towards the core in a rotating disk.
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.
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.
As this collapsing cloud, called a solar nebula, becomes denser, random gas motions originally present in the cloud average out in favor of the direction of the nebula's net angular momentum. Conservation of angular momentum causes the rotation to increase as the nebula radius decreases. This rotation causes the cloud to flatten out—much like ...
Earth has a lot of water. It’s almost like we’re hoarding the stuff for a not so rainy day. All of that water is more or less the defining feature of our planet when seen from a distance, but ...
[f] [154] [155] Filling the space between the stars is a disk of gas and dust called the interstellar medium. This disk has at least a comparable extent in radius to the stars, [156] whereas the thickness of the gas layer ranges from hundreds of light-years for the colder gas to thousands of light-years for warmer gas. [157] [158]