Scott Tremaine, “Astrophysical Wonders” (Open Agenda, 2021)
New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
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The Star Formation Process
The star formation process, we believe, is occurring because a gas is cooling. As it loses energy, it can't support itself against its own gravity and so the material begins to condense. The details of how that works, we can only really measure in the vicinity of the sun, so we have no idea whether it's the same early in the history of the universe. But roughly speaking, you see clouds. You see very dense structures called cores within the clouds. And we see new stars peeking out through the gas an of small particles around them.
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