ASTRON 1F03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Interstellar Cloud, Solar Radius, Protostar
12 Mar 2018
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Document Summary
The interstellar medium consists of dust and gas: Gas includes small atoms and molecules (h and he for the majority) Dust is more like smoke. interstellar reddening occurs because interstellar dust absorbs and scatters blue light waves more than red light waves, making stars appear redder than they are. A nebula is an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionized gases. Formation of sun-like stars: stage 1: interstellar cloud starts to contract. The evolution of stars more massive then the sun s faster=> lifetime= 1/m^3, opposite is true for less massive sun. If the fragment of cloud is too small (0. 08 solar masses) nuclear fusion does not occur=> called brown dwarfs. Because a single interstellar cloud can produce many stars of the same age and composition, star clusters are an excellent way to study the effect of mass on stellar. Most of the stars in a cluster are roughly at the same distance away from.
