Facts About Space

Astronomy for Everybody and Young People

Finding the stars

When observing the night sky, the first question is a restless mind is: What is a star? A star is a huge sphere of hot gas and bright, which produces its own energy through so-called nuclear reactions that take place in the core-center- of the star reaching huge temperatures, and appearing as a luminous phenomenon that accompanies us on our observations of the night sky on a clear night.

Stars have a life cycle like any living being are born, grow to evolve and grow and eventually die and disappear more or less violent, such as an explosion of supernova that can trigger the process of birth of other new stars. But it happens so slowly that they can be seen in the human timescale.

The Universe is an almost infinite space with room for millions of stars, star clusters and galaxies. The distance from the Sun, which is the closest star to Earth is called the Astronomical Unit, AU – and amounts to 149,597,870 km. Given that the speed of light is 300,000 km per second, the visible light observed from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach earth. The next closest star to the Sun is called Proxima Centauri , and the emitted light takes over 4 years to reach Earth. This means that when you look at this star, is “seeing” how it was more than four years and not know how at the present time. And indeed, when one observes the Sun with the proper eye protection, it “sees” what it was about eight minutes.

Molecular clouds

On clear nights, especially when viewed in the field with a small telescope, far from cities or towns that illuminate the night sky, you can also see areas nebulae where stars are born, like the Orion or M42 in the constellation of same name. These are called molecular clouds.

Molecular clouds are huge and deep dark clouds that are formed by a gas called hydrogen (99%) and interstellar dust in a very small proportion (1%), but enough so that under certain conditions, the stars can be born. You could say that these clouds provide the raw material for star formation.

The embryos of future stars are hidden inside of molecular clouds, and only the radio and infrared waves from the electromagnetic spectrum , emitted by these embryos of stars, through these dark regions – not the visible light-. With appropriate equipment such as telescopes in space or radio antennas on ground-based observatories we can interpret the results of the data, and develop a theory of star formation.

The birth of a star

Although the proportion of dust in the cloud material is small compared with the amount of gas, these clouds are so extensive that they accumulate enough mass to generate thousands, even millions of stars like the Sun

The formation process is triggered when for some reason, there is a “fragmentation” of the cloud, breaking it into fragments with enough density-relation between the amount of mass and occupied volume to begin to shrink slowly. The reason that is the origin of a fragmentation can be the arrival of a shock wave from the aforementioned explosion of a close supernova – the final stage of stars with large mass-

This process is irreversible, the fragment of cloud continues to contract and become more dense to a value-twenty orders of magnitude greater than the original cloud -fragment – from which there is enough mass to begin to act the force of gravity , making the cloud collapses so it collapses under its own weight . This event forms the core of the star: the protostar, which continues to fall on the rest of the field of fragment cloud.

As material continues to fall in the protostar, it begins to rotate, driving turn-geyser-like jets of matter- at large distances and high speeds, making the protostar does not rotate too quickly which would lead to its disintegration.

Because of this initial rotation, the matter of the cloud is deposited preferentially in the equator of the protostar, forming what is known as a disk of matter orbiting the protostar, and that may be the seed of a future system of planets around it, similar to the solar system .

This first stage of star formation takes about 100,000 years and as it is obscured by the dust cloud. We have to use, as mentioned before, radio telescopes (capture the emission of radio waves) or infrared telescopes to detect that stage.

Then, as the material falls onto the protostar and fragment shell of gas and dust cloud dissipates, the embryo is visible. In a Sun-like star, this happens a million years after the start of the process of collapse.

A new star

After ten million years, the first contraction process of collapse by gravity end. During that time, the temperature of the protostar has grown enormously, and that temperature is so high that when the collapse ends, the thermonuclear reactions begin to happens using hydrogen as fuel in the core of the star, making it a heavier element called Helium. At this point we can say that a new star is born and is in a phase of life called main sequence.

The star is stable as it is in a state known as hydrostatic equilibrium: the force that pushes outward (the pressure of the energy produced by nuclear reactions) is compensated by the force that pushes inward, gravity.

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