Formation of Stars



The recipe for creating a star in one of these stellar nurseries calls for hydrogen gas, dust, and some amount of heat and gravity, astronomers claim. But they still don’t know quite how all the parts come together or what triggers the event. They, by now, could spot some regions in space, which are especially good at creating massive stars. Several theories have been cropped up. One predicts that low-mass stars accrete surrounding material. Another calls for the forceful combination of two protostars. A third, called the “collect-and-collapse” model, says that a parent massive star influences the formation of second-generation stars. Supporting the collect-and-collapse model, without ruling out the other models, a collection of images presented by astronomers at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, France provides the most complete and detailed evidence. In the most recently released set of images, an orange version shows the dust shell that surrounds the HII region RCW 79.



Via: USA Today, MSNBC, more...