News tagged with star formation

Transforming galaxies

(PhysOrg.com) -- Many of the Universe's galaxies are like our own, displaying beautiful spiral arms wrapping around a bright nucleus. Examples in this stunning image, taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 on ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created 7 hours ago | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

The turbulent birth of super star clusters in galaxy mergers

By combining two of the most advanced telescopes in the world -- the new Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of ESO -- a team of French astronomers from the Institut d'astrophysique ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Feb 10, 2012 | popularity 5 / 5 (4) | comments 0

Black holes and star formation

(PhysOrg.com) -- It has long been recognized that galaxy mergers or even close interactions can play a vital role in shaping the morphology of galaxies. One way they can do so, it is thought, is by triggering ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Feb 09, 2012 | popularity 4.1 / 5 (7) | comments 7 | with audio podcast

Do black holes help stars form?

(PhysOrg.com) -- The center of just about every galaxy is thought to host a black hole, some with masses of thousands of millions of Suns and consequently strong gravitational pulls that disrupt material around ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Feb 03, 2012 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (6) | comments 1 | with audio podcast

Classic portrait of a barred spiral galaxy

(PhysOrg.com) -- The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a picture of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1073, which is found in the constellation of Cetus (The Sea Monster). Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Feb 03, 2012 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (7) | comments 3 | with audio podcast

The wild early lives of today's most massive galaxies

(PhysOrg.com) -- Using the APEX telescope, a team of astronomers has found the strongest link so far between the most powerful bursts of star formation in the early Universe, and the most massive galaxies ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jan 25, 2012 | popularity 4.4 / 5 (5) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

'Proplyd-like' objects discovered in Cygnus OB2

The well known Orion Nebula is perhaps the most well known star forming regions in the sky. The four massive stars known as the trapezium illuminate the massive cloud of gas and dust busily forming into new ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jan 16, 2012 | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 0

ALMA early science result reveals starving galaxies

(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers using the partially completed ALMA observatory have found compelling evidence for how star-forming galaxies evolve into 'red and dead' elliptical galaxies, catching a large group ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jan 11, 2012 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (4) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Herschel and Spitzer see nearby galaxies' stardust

(PhysOrg.com) -- The cold dust that builds blazing stars is revealed in new images that combine observations from the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency-led mission with important NASA contributions; ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jan 10, 2012 | popularity 5 / 5 (3) | comments 0

A universal law for star formation

(PhysOrg.com) -- Star formation is studied by astronomers not only because it produces new stars and planetary systems. It also generates copious amounts of ultraviolet light that heats dust which in turn ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jan 09, 2012 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (3) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Image: Active Galaxy Centaurus A

(PhysOrg.com) -- Resembling looming rain clouds on a stormy day, dark lanes of dust crisscross the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A.

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jan 04, 2012 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (4) | comments 0

Subaru's sharp eye confirms signs of unseen planets in the dust ring of HR 4796 A

(PhysOrg.com) -- The SEEDS (Strategic Exploration of Exoplanets and Disks with Subaru Telescope/HiCIAO) project, a five-year international collaboration launched in 2009 and led by Motohide Tamura of NAOJ ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Dec 30, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (11) | comments 1 | with audio podcast

A 'Rose' made of galaxies

(PhysOrg.com) -- In celebration of the twenty-first anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's deployment in April 2011, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute pointed Hubble's eye to an especially ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Dec 21, 2011 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (8) | comments 0

How can growing galaxies stay silent?

Beginning around 2005, astronomers began discovering the presence of very large galaxies at a distance of around 10 billion lightyears. But while these galaxies were large, they didn’t appear to have ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Dec 19, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (2) | comments 1

Researcher peers into universe's ancient past to better know how stars form

(PhysOrg.com) -- It takes light from our closest star, the Sun, about eight minutes to reach Earth. But light that leaves stars in distant galaxies takes a lot more time to reach our planet — billions of years more.

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Dec 07, 2011 | popularity 4 / 5 (1) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

Star formation

Star formation is the process by which dense parts of molecular clouds collapse into a ball of plasma to form a star. As a branch of astronomy star formation includes the study of the interstellar medium and giant molecular clouds (GMC) as precursors to the star formation process and the study of young stellar objects and planet formation as its immediate products. Star formation theory, as well as accounting for the formation of a single star, must also account for the statistics of binary stars and the initial mass function.

For more information about Star formation, read the full article at Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Related topics: galaxies , stars , black holes