Related topics: star formation · young stars

Stardust from red giants

Some of the Earth's building material was stardust from red giants, researchers from ETH Zurich have established. They have also explained why the Earth contains more of this stardust than the asteroids or the planet Mars, ...

Herschel telescope bows out after successful mission

Europe's deep-space Herschel telescope has given up the ghost—running out of coolant after a successful mission to observe the birth of stars and galaxies, the European Space Agency said Monday.

Exploring the dusty prehistory of the solar system

The solar system as we know it formed about 4.6 billion years ago as fields of interstellar dust orbiting the sun aggregated into planets and smaller objects. Presolar dust particles no longer exist in the inner solar system, ...

Water could have been abundant in the first billion years

How soon after the Big Bang could water have existed? Not right away, because water molecules contain oxygen and oxygen had to be formed in the first stars. Then that oxygen had to disperse and unite with hydrogen in significant ...

The initial mass function

The gas and dust in giant molecular clouds gradually come together under the influence of gravity to form stars. Precisely how this occurs, however, is incompletely understood. The mass of a star, for example, is by far the ...

The search for molecular oxygen among cosmic oxygen atoms

Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe (after hydrogen and helium) and of course it is important: all known life forms require liquid water and its oxygen content. For over thirty years, astronomers have ...

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