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The birth of a star is a mysterious process.
Hydrogen gas pulls into a tight knot to build the star. A swirling flat disk of dust and gas circles the forming star. The disk is clumpy and stormy. The clumps have gravity that pulls in more dust, and they grow until they become planets around the star. Scientists don’t know for sure if all stars have planets. However, it seems unlikely that only certain kinds of stars would have them.
▲ Stellar Hula Hoop
Newborn planets around a star are like bumper cars in superslow motion. They crash, making big puffs of dust. You can see that in the narrow, dusty ring around the star Fomalhaut (above). The gravity of an unseen planet may be tugging at the ring. This would pull it off-center from the star, like a hula hoop spinning around someone’s waist.
▲ Star Power
This is part of the Pelican Nebula, in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. The “mountains” are formed by an area of denser gas and dust. It is slowly being eaten away by ultraviolet radiation from nearby young, hot stars. Stars form in the dusty and dense interior of the nebula.
◀ Snakelike Jets
This jet of gas is half a light-year long! It has burst out of a dark cloud of gas and dust that hides the newly forming star. The jet is coiled. That means the star forming the jet is wobbling like a top. The star is forming in a dense gas cloud at the edge of the Gum Nebula. This nebula is the expanding remains of an exploded star.
▲ Jet Set
They look like two antennae on a snail’s head. A pair of trillion-mile-long stellar jets blast out of the tip of a huge gaseous pillar in the Trifid Nebula. The jets have a corkscrew shape. That tell us the stars launching them are spinning.
▲ Grinding Up Planets
This illustration shows how two rocky, planet-size objects crash and make a dust ring around stars. Asteroids, comets, and newly forming planets are all spinning around in space. Astronomers think they smash together and break into pieces. The pieces crash into other pieces. This process creates smaller and smaller bits, which circle the star.
