Scorching storms on distant worlds revealed in new detail

Astronomers have created the most detailed weather report so far for two distant worlds beyond our own solar system. The international study—the first of its kind—reveals the extreme atmospheric conditions on the celestial ...

Image: Hubble examines elliptical galaxy Messier 105

It might appear featureless and unexciting at first glance, but NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations of this elliptical galaxy—known as Messier 105—show that the stars near the galaxy's center are moving very ...

Webb Space Telescope captures star clusters in Cosmic Gems arc

An international team of astronomers has used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to discover gravitationally bound star clusters when the universe was 460 million years old. This is the first discovery of star clusters ...

Euclid is finding free floating planets in Orion, too

There are likely millions of "rogue" or free-floating planets (FFPs) spread through the galaxy. These planets, which aren't big enough to become stars but also aren't beholden to a star's gravity, are some of the hardest ...

Star cluster shines in new look from NASA's Chandra

Westerlund 1 is the biggest and closest "super" star cluster to Earth. New data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, in combination with other NASA telescopes, is helping astronomers delve deeper into this galactic factory ...

Hubble views broad and sweeping spiral galaxy NGC 4731

This new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the broad and sweeping spiral galaxy NGC 4731. It lies in the constellation Virgo and is located 43 million light-years from Earth. This highly detailed image ...

page 1 from 40

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.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA