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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 new star. The disk is clumpy and stormy. The clumps pull in more dust with gravity. 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
New planets around a star are like bumper cars in superslow motion. They crash, making big puffs of dust. You can see that in this picture. It shows a narrow, dusty ring around the star Fomalhaut. The gravity of an unseen planet may be tugging at the ring. This would pull the ring off-center from the star, like a hula hoop spinning around your waist.
▲ Star Power
This is part of the Pelican Nebula. That nebula is in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. The “mountains” are formed by an area of thicker gas and dust. It is slowly being eaten away by ultraviolet radiation from young, hot stars. Stars form inside the dusty, dense 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 forming star. The jet is coiled. That means the star forming the jet is wobbling like a top. The star is being born in a dense gas cloud at the edge of the Gum Nebula. It is the expanding remains of an exploded star.
▲ Jet Set
They look like the antennae on a snail’s head. Two trillion-mile-long stellar jets blast out of the tip of a huge gas pillar in the Trifid Nebula. The jets look like corkscrews. The stars launching them are probably spinning.
▲ Grinding Up Planets
This illustration is of two rocky, planet-size objects crashing. It shows how the crash makes the dust ring around stars. Asteroids, comets, and newly forming planets all spin around in space. Astronomers think they smash together and break up. The pieces crash into other pieces. This creates smaller and smaller bits, which circle the star.
