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How A Star is Born

Since my entire thesis for this paper is about how a star is born, I guess the first thing I should start out with is by telling you exactly what a star is. Stars are self-luminous gaseous spheres. They shine by generating their own energy and radiating it off into space. The stars' fuel for energy generation is the stuff they are made of -- hydrogen, helium, carbon, etc. -- which they burn by converting these elements into heavier elements. Nuclear fusion occurs, which is when the nuclei of atoms fuse into nuclei of heavier atoms. The energy given off by a star through nuclear burning heats its interior to many millions and, even in some cases to Pleiades Star Clusterhundreds of millions to billions of degrees Fahrenheit. It causes heat to flow from the interior toward the surface, where it is released out into space and makes the star shine. Because stars are only so big, they will eventually use up their nuclear fuel and run out of energy. (University of Oregon, Unknown) The first step in making new stars is to compress a cloud in order to strengthen gravity's effect so that the cloud material can contract and break-up into smaller units that eventually collapse to form stars. The clouds in the inter-stellar space are calledInter-stellar Medium, which are mainly made up Rho Ophiuchiof hydrogen and helium. The cloud itself is very cold, somewhere around a hundred degrees Kelvin, which is far below -150C. All particles in the cloud attract each other by gravitational force. According to calculations of scientists, a cloud having the mass comparable to the mass of our Sun will be able to hold itself together due to the gravity pushing against it. As traveling compression waves move past a cool molecular cloud, it compresses the cloud, driving the particles closer together. If the compressed cloud has no way to stop th...

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