Protostar
Listen now
Description
Transcript: A protostar is a cloud of interstellar gas and dust that’s dense enough and cool enough to contract gravitationally to form a star. An interstellar cloud may be close to the state of collapse for millions of years and be triggered by a nearby disturbance such as the death or birth of a nearby star. The collapse occurs extremely quickly on an astronomical timescale in about a hundred thousand years. This is a hundred thousand times less than the lifetime of the Sun. In the first stage of collapse it is freefall. The collapse is as rapid as gravity will allow.
More Episodes
Transcript: The laws of microscopic physics are invariant with respect to time which is to say that microscopic interactions can move backwards or forwards equally well. The laws of physics really say nothing about the arrow of time, and yet when a movie is run backwards it’s obviously silly and...
Published 07/25/11
Transcript: Disorder or entropy tends to increase because disordered states are usually the most common outcome in an experiment or any situation. Take the artificial but simple example of four coins, each of which has two outcomes when it’s tossed and is independent of the other. There are two...
Published 07/25/11
Transcript: The third law of thermodynamics states that it’s impossible to remove all the heat from a physical system. At the temperature absolute zero there is no heat, and there is no atomic motion. So there would be no friction, and perfect machines with perpetual motion would be possible. ...
Published 07/25/11