Melania Brolis (Osservatorio Astronomico)

Stars form in interstellar clouds of gas and dust, trillions of miles across. When the random motions of the gas cause a small part of the cloud to become denser than the rest of the cloud, gas begins to collapse, contract, and heat up. At temperatures of millions of degrees, nuclear fusion begins at the center of the gas clump and a star is born. In some clouds, dozens or hundreds of stars form together creating a star cluster. This movie shows images, taken with various telescopes, of one star that has formed in the Orion Nebula star cluster.

Star formation

The movie takes us on a journey from the night sky to the Orion Nebula, a star forming region at the belt of the constellation Orion. Each image in the sequence reveals more detail, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. Near the final image, we see newly hatched stars swaddled in teardrop-shaped cocoons of gas called proplyds. These are the remnants of the protostellar gas clouds that collapsed to form these new stars. Finally, we look closely at a new star, not quite as bright as our own Sun, with what appears to be a dark, gaseous protoplanetary disk around it. Could this be a new solar system being born?

Austin Reiter