BIOS10112 Chapter All Chapters: Mapping the Deep Notes
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Hydrogen clumped into extremely large clouds, and they collapsed under the force of their own gravitation, forming embryonic galaxies. Within the large clouds, these fragments collapsed to form stars; temperatures rose again to what they had been a few minutes after the big bang this was 3000 years later. Hydrogen first encountered oxygen as layers of hot star-gas that was blown up rammed into clouds of primeval hydrogen left over from the big bang. Albert cheung- grad student in astronomy at berkeley. Cheung and townes had discovered a water maser in space. Note: maser is the microwave forerunner of the laser; radio astronomers used masers to amplify the weak signals they were receiving from the heavens. The molecular cloud in orion was cool enough and dense enough to allow gravity to triumph over heat; which is necessary for a gas cloud to collapse in on itself to form a star.
