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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] As a branch of astronomy, star formation includes the study of the interstellar medium (ISM) and giant molecular clouds (GMC) as precursors to ...
Stellar evolution is the process by which a star changes over the course of time. Depending on the mass of the star, its lifetime can range from a few million years for the most massive to trillions of years for the least massive, which is considerably longer than the current age of the universe. The table shows the lifetimes of stars as a ...
A star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud. A star is a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by self-gravity. [1] The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night; their immense distances from Earth make them appear as fixed points of light.
Contents. Formation and evolution of the Solar System. 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 ...
The time between the first formation of Population III stars until the cessation of star formation, leaving all stars in the form of degenerate remnants. Far future > 100 Ta < −0.99 < 0.1 K The Stelliferous Era will end as stars eventually die and fewer are born to replace them, leading to a darkening universe. Various theories suggest a ...
Hertzsprung–Russell diagram. An observational Hertzsprung–Russell diagram with 22,000 stars plotted from the Hipparcos Catalogue and 1,000 from the Gliese Catalogue of nearby stars. Stars tend to fall only into certain regions of the diagram. The most prominent is the diagonal, going from the upper-left (hot and bright) to the lower-right ...
Neutron star. Central neutron star at the heart of the Crab Nebula. Radiation from the rapidly spinning pulsar PSR B1509-58 makes nearby gas emit X-rays (gold) and illuminates the rest of the nebula, here seen in infrared (blue and red). A neutron star is a collapsed core of a massive supergiant star.
A supernova ( pl.: supernovae or supernovas) is a powerful and luminous explosion of a star. A supernova occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star, or when a white dwarf is triggered into runaway nuclear fusion. The original object, called the progenitor, either collapses to a neutron star or black hole, or is completely ...