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A star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud. A star is a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by self-gravity. [ 1] The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night; their immense distances from Earth make them appear as fixed points of light.
Star formation is the process by which dense regions within molecular clouds in interstellar space, sometimes referred to as "stellar nurseries" or " star -forming regions", collapse and form stars. [ 1] As a branch of astronomy, star formation includes the study of the interstellar medium (ISM) and giant molecular clouds (GMC) as precursors to ...
The main sequence is visible as a prominent diagonal band from upper left to lower right. This plot shows 22,000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalog together with 1,000 low-luminosity stars (red and white dwarfs) from the Gliese Catalogue of Nearby Stars. In astronomy, the main sequence is a classification of stars which appear on plots of stellar ...
A "blue moon" refers to a second full moon that falls within the same month span. "A blue moon is really a rare phenomenon," explains Lisa Stardust, astrologer and author. "A blue moon occurs ...
Blue giant. In astronomy, a blue giant is a hot star with a luminosity class of III ( giant) or II ( bright giant ). In the standard Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, these stars lie above and to the right of the main sequence . The term applies to a variety of stars in different phases of development, all evolved stars that have moved from the ...
Herbig–Haro object. Herbig–Haro ( HH) objects are bright patches of nebulosity associated with newborn stars. They are formed when narrow jets of partially ionised gas ejected by stars collide with nearby clouds of gas and dust at several hundred kilometers per second. Herbig–Haro objects are commonly found in star-forming regions, and ...
The Milky Way is approximately 890 billion to 1.54 trillion times the mass of the Sun in total (8.9 × 10 11 to 1.54 × 10 12 solar masses), [ 7][ 8][ 9] although stars and planets make up only a small part of this. Estimates of the mass of the Milky Way vary, depending upon the method and data used.
Artist's conception of the spiral structure of the Milky Way showing Baade's general population categories. The blue regions in the spiral arms are composed of the younger population I stars, while the yellow stars in the central bulge are the older population II stars. In reality, many population I stars are also found mixed in with the older ...