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Asked by anon-181147 on 1 Jun 2018.
Question: How are stars made?
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Nathan Clarke answered on 1 Jun 2018:
A star is born with lots of practice and singing in the shower (that’s how Justin Bieber did it, right?). On a more serious note…
Dust and gas are scattered throughout the galaxy. A little bit of turbulence causes pockets of dust and gas to start attracting each other until they collapse inwards. The collapse continues and starts to heat up. This forms a protostar. The star then matures to the familiar bright, burning balls of gas we see at night.
Our nearest star is the Sun and it takes about 50 million years for a protostar to reach this stage. It will stay mature for roughly 10 billion years. Eventually, it will burn out and die. The larger the star, the shorter it’s life.
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Lauren Burns answered on 1 Jun 2018:
Luckily, Nathan Clarke was able to answer this, because I was really not sure (or confident enough to answer!). That’s a great thing about being a scientist, and often people forget, you don’t have to know everything there is to know about science, you just have your interests, and eventually just learn quite a bit about your own field (though even that can be broad!).
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Donna MacCallum answered on 1 Jun 2018:
I have no idea… we need to ask Brian Cox on twitter!
My expertise is microbiology, and models of fungal infections… it would be great to know about lots of different areas of science, but it’s impossible to be an expert on everything… my brain might explode! -
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Alex Haragan answered on 3 Jun 2018:
My mama told me when I was young
We are all born superstars.[/Lady Gaga]
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Camille Parsons answered on 4 Jun 2018:
I have no exact answer to how stars are born. But luckily in this group of scientist taking part in the MRC Festival zone, as with many medical research teams, there are a variety of individuals with many different skills and so it appears Nathan has the knowledge to help us all learn about stars! Thank Nathan 🙂
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Joey Shepherd answered on 4 Jun 2018:
I’m not too sure but luckily, Nathan knows – thanks Nathan! I do love stars and astronomy though – my favourite star is Betelguese (or ‘Beetlejuice’ :)!) , a huge orange star in the constellation of Orion that you can see in the night sky with your naked eye. It’s so big that while one million earths could fit inside our Sun (which is of course a star), Betelguese is many thousands times bigger again than the Sun. WOW!
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