How do stars form?

How do stars form?

Well, we know the basics. If you look up in the night sky in the winter, you can see a constellation called Orion. With Orion's belt: 3 stars in a diagonal line. Just below that hangs Orion's sword. And even with the naked eye, from a city, you can see that one of those stars is odd: it's fuzzy. If you look in binoculars or a telescope, you can see it's what we call a nebula. It's a vast region of gas and dust. Now within that dust, there are some very cold places, just 10 degrees above absolute zero. And at those temperatures, the gas is able to collapse under its own gravity. What happens is this collapse goes on, and at the center, the density goes up. And atoms begin to hit each other. And then there's a point where you reach a critical density. Atoms can then hit each other often. And when they do, they merge, and they start turning hydrogen into helium. And that's the ignition that starts the star. The young star then blows off the rest of the material and comes out into the big, wide world. So, we know the very basics of how stars form. The details are complicated and not well understood, but they form from gas clouds that are collapsing.