A Star is Born

A star's birth is marked by traumatic events. Once the necessary materials for star formation have been assembled and the very long gestation period draws to its inevitable end, a series of intricate processes occur in rapid succession that result in the formation of a new sun. In today's lecture we will consider how this process occurs. We shall see that star-birth is influenced by such fundamental effects as:

• rotation

• magnetic fields

• gravitation

• gas pressure

We will also become acquainted with new classes of objects including

• jets and bipolar flows

• Herbig-Haro Objects

• T-Tauri stars

Perhaps the most significant idea that we will encounter is that, on taking its place on the HR diagram, a new star illustrates one of the most fundamental ideas of astrophysics - the HR diagram is "ALIVE"!