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The pillars of creation are a large star forming region made of interstellar gas and dust in
the Eagle nebula. The left pillar is about 4 light years in height, thats about 40 trillion
kilometers.
Stars were once like disobedient teenagers that you just couldn't quite predict before they
became the bright glorious objects you see in the sky. But they arent just like any normal
teenager, these are 100,000 year old teenagers. They still have a will they wont they aura
about them when theyre still in their teenage years that we havent come to understand yet.
A star begins its life as a rumble in a giant molecular cloud in a galaxy when things - as if
somebody flicked a switch - fall out of balance. Pressure keeping the molecules apart is
overcome by gravity, with gravitys ocd tendencies it organises the molecules into nice little
packages. Like a snowball, all these little packages begin clumping together, dragging in all
the surrounding gases. And as the clump grows, it starts to rotate, dragging more molecules
towards it. As the core gets bigger and rotates faster, it also gets hotter and becomes what is
known as a protostar with an accretion disk made up of gas and molecules surrounding it. In
the accretion disk everything close to the centre is spinning much quicker than the molecules
lingering on the outskirts of the accretion disk. As the molecules hit off each other as they are
collapsing towards the centre of the protostar in the accretion disk, they give off energy in the
form of infrared radiation, which allows us to see their birth here on Earth.
Keeping the disk nice and flat are magnetic field lines running perpendicularly through the
disk. The gas and the field lines are married to each other and dont move of their own
accord. The magnetic field lines above all else do not want to be bent so the material will
collapse along the field lines into a disk creating a flat disk, before collapsing radially
towards the centre of the disk. To bend the magnetic field lines the disk must overcome
angular momentum. This is like the effect which pulls you in the car while going around a
roundabout.
Just how the angular momentum is overcome is unknown to astrophysicists and is being
modelled using high tech computers to model possible situations. One theory involves the
bending and stretching of the magnet lines, this theory is called the magnetorotational
instability(MRI). It involves particles moving in and out from the centre of the disk into areas
of higher and lower velocity randomly. The magnetic field lines begin acting like a spring
between the particles transferring the angular momentum between the two. When this begins,
there is an avalanche effect and turbulence occurs to generate the star. As the angular
momentum is overcome, more and more material accretes onto the protostar and fusion
begins creating a star after 10,000,000 years.
Very fast computers are needed to run algorithms to simulate these perturbations due to MRI
and a lot of time is needed. That or a very long time to watch the sky. So for now, how
exactly the star butterflies from a protostar to a fusion star is a mystery as this is a new area of
research for astrophysicists.