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Articles on Star formation

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Like a cosmic roulette wheel, we exist because of a very lucky combination of factors. NASA/JPL-Caltech

We are lucky to live in a universe made for us

If some of the laws of physics were only infinitesimally different, we would simply not exist. It almost looks like the universe itself was built for life. But how can that be?
NASA artists’ interpretation of the neutron star Swift J1749.4-2807 (left) with it’s companion star (right). NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Explainer: what is a neutron star?

They’re are the overachievers of the universe: incredibly dense but very small when compared to others stars. So how much do we know about the extreme behaviour of neutron stars?
A colour image of G63349, one of the galaxies in the survey, created using near-infrared (VISTA telescope) and optical (Sloan telescope) data collated by the GAMA survey. (The bright green object is a nearby star.) ICRAR/GAMA

Don’t panic, but the universe is slowly dying

Our universe’s most exciting days are well behind us, with new research showing the universe is now slowly but surely dying.
A needle in a haystack? Search for the first ever biological molecule. Hubble Heritage/Flickr

Why is life left-handed? The answer is in the stars

Researchers have created a star-forming cloud in the laboratory to try to recreate the first-ever biological molecule. The study could explain why such molecules are left-handed.
Artist’s impression of exocomets around Beta Pictoris. ESO/L. Calçada

Comet families similar to our own are found around another star

A detailed study of comets orbiting the young nearby star Beta Pictoris is published today in the journal Nature, and it reveals striking similarities to the comets found in our solar system. Over the…
An artist’s impression of a galactic protocluster forming in the early universe. European Southern Observatory

From galactic pile-ups, stars are born: a crash course in clusters

Clusters of galaxies have back-stories worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster: their existences are marked by violence, death and birth, arising after extragalactic pile-ups where groups of galaxies crashed…
The dawn of a new day. Flickr/Christos Tsoumplekas

Explainer: how does our sun shine?

What makes our sun shine has been a mystery for most of human history. Given our sun is a star and stars are suns, explaining the source of the sun’s energy would help us understand why stars shine. An…
There are some massive galaxies out there, and we now know a little about their early life. Lauro Roger McAllister/Flickr

It’s about time: young galaxies were dense, intense star-makers

A piece of the galaxy formation puzzle may have fallen into place, thanks to a team of European and American astronomers peering into the depths of our early universe. According to new research published…
If gas clouds collided to create big stars, they might look like this during the collision. This is the RCW120 Spitzer Bubble. NASA

Milky Way’s biggest star may have had a different beginning

The current theory of star formation has a problem: it cannot make big stars. In the standard star-making recipe, stars are formed in the depths of gas clouds made from molecular hydrogen. These clouds…

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