Star Formation

Learn how a Star is Created in 30 Minutes!

This picture of a protostar in its accretion phase in the coldest, darkest, highest pressure of a molecular cloud figures large in understanding how stars form. Details of the image can be found in the posting on how gas bodies optically express themselves. Introduction This is the presentation that I gave at the 2026 Royal Astronomical Society of Canada‘s General Assembly this month (May 2026). I found that it summarizes the star formation process and how I interpret images fairly well and so I posted it here. I hope you enjoy. Thank-you Charles, for your kind introduction. My name is David Payne, I am a retired Professional Chemical Engineer, a member of the Victoria Centre of the RASC, and author

Gas Expression – Visual, Photographic, and Astrophysical

In this blog, we will discuss both how these gases turn up on our camera, and how astrophysics/spectroscopy identify and measure them. You will see that sometimes what we think we know is based on rock solid “DNA” evidence, while in many other cases, the evidence is purely circumstantial. For ease of explanation I will actually perform this task in reverse – like a mock trial – explaining what we believe the gases are and then the evidence that supports it. At the end, you may just interpret our astrophotographic images a little differently. In the vast expanse of our Milky Way, gases form the invisible backbone, shaping everything from star formation to galactic structure. They are the subject matter

A Galaxy of Dynamic Gases

The success of n-body numerical simulation to predict the motion of planets and stars cannot be denied. At the same time, the erroneous application of these model to intra-galactic objects and galaxies themselves have led to a popular narrative that is full of magic and other non-sense. In this ambitious posting, I have put together the astrophysical data in a different way – one that looks at objects from a more scientific and engineering point of view. This data has been used to show that the various objects in space should be considered as continuum bodies, rather than collections of particles. Classical physical laws and concepts are used to show how and why many of the phenomenon we see and

Thermodynamic Cloud Collapse & Me vs Gravity & Grok

Since I began working on this website, I have been using AI to fetch equations, data, and history. In general, I don’t bother discussing things much with AI, because typically AI relies on authority – number of journal articles, citations, simulations, status indicators, and other non-scientific bases to form its opinions. Me, on the other hand, I take the Richard Feynman philosophy that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts“. If AI believes you are straying from its narrative, it tries to “correct” you and actually let you know that what you are asking for is wrong. It finds something it agrees with, and then, tries to interject that it was at least somewhat right all along. It

Video Post – How Friction Creates a Galaxy’s Spirals

The videos presented here represent a culmination of my analysis of spiral galactic structure. The conventional explanations of how spiral work try to shoe-horn the partial differential equations of Navier-Stokes and Maxwell, into the ordinary ones of astro-physicist’s simulations and this leads to gross misrepresentations. It is like an illness in the popular scientific community that is directly related, although less political, to the climate simulators and their ODE simulations of our dynamic, convective atmosphere. “Unicorn” constructs, such as gravity density waves are really how the ODE solutions are tricked into giving realistic results. Shortcuts to PDEs, such as “Ram Pressure”, are elevated to the position of real explanations. There videos take a overview look at how spiral galaxies really

The Anatomy of a Stellar Nursery

Introducing the Rosette Nebula / Stellar Nursery When I first started to image stellar nurseries, I really didn’t know anything about them. I was told that stars are being born there – that is pretty awesome, but I was curious what was it about these light generating molecular clouds (MCs) that made them prolific star builders. Sure, stars are also created in turbulent dark molecular clouds, but stellar nurseries really churn out the stars at a much higher level – often creating whole open clusters of stars. Many of the stellar nurseries get very large and can even be mapped from their Halpha light signal in other galaxies. Ok, so my interest was piqued – I had to figure out

Star Nucleation Amped Up by Tidal Effects

Spiral galaxies can vary widely in the amount of stars they are generating. It is asserted that star nucleation, via the imposition of high pressure over small volumes of molecular cloud, is the rate determining step. Turbulence of molecular clouds in galaxies is greatly increased when the chaotic, but stable, spiral galactic structure is disturbed by tidal effects of nearby galaxies. In this posting, the three main galaxies of the Leo triplet are used to illustrate and link the chain of events from tidal influence to rapid star production in the galaxies we image.

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