Besides being a point of light, a star is a luminous, spherical mass of plasma, enough to hold itself together under its own gravity. On its own, though, gravitational rounding isn't enough. What ...

Chemistry in the first 50 million to 100 million years after the Big Bang may have been more active than we expected.

Astronomers studying how elements heavier than iron were produced in the early Milky Way have identified a distinct series of epochs of galaxy-wide chemical formation. This evolutionary timeline, ...

The James Webb Space Telescope caught the birth of an enormous star with particle beams cutting across a stretch of ...

Stellar size and class diversification originates from the initial mass of the molecular cloud from which stars form. The elemental composition of the molecular cloud, specifically the abundance of ...

Scientists led by Tel Aviv University’s Tomer Shenar, with Hugues Sana of KU Leuven and Julia Bodensteiner of the University ...

Stars form in the universe from massive clouds of gas. European Southern Observatory, CC BY-SA For decades, astronomers have wondered what the very first stars in the universe were like. These stars ...

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Luke Keller, Ithaca College (THE CONVERSATION) For decades, astronomers have wondered ...