The Birth of Suns

We normally think of space as empty, but it's not. The space between the stars in our Galaxy contains, on average, about 1 atom per cubic centimeter. That's a better vacuum than the best vacuum chamber we know how to make, but there are a lot of cubic centimeters in interstellar space, and the mass between the stars of our Galaxy adds up to about 10% of the mass of all the stars. It is from this interstellar medium that new stars are continually born, at a rate of about 1 new Sun per year. In this talk I will describe our current understanding of the gas in interstellar space, and how and why it condenses to make new stars.

Speaker: Dr. mark Krumholz, UC Santa Cruz