Astrophysics Lectures - A Star is Born - Mike Grudic - 05/10/2019

How do stars form? Our galaxy alone has hundreds of billions of stars, with a few more forming every year. We explain what astronomers already know about star formation, and what mysteries lie ahead. Presentation: 0:35; Q&A: 25:07 Date: May 10, 2019 Lecturer: Mike Grudic Title: A Star is Born Abstract: Stars are the building blocks of galaxies and home to the planets. We must understand how stars form to explain many other aspects of the Universe, yet many mysteries remain about this complex process. Starting from the Big Bang, I will walk us through the chain of events that we know had to happen to produce a star like our Sun in a galaxy like the Milky Way. Then, I will talk about the main things we don't know: why do the stars form in the quantity that they do? Why is the typical mass of a newborn star the same everywhere we have looked? And why is star formation so slow? I will show how observations and theory are working together to answer these fundamental questions about how a star is born. Accompanying Expert Panel Q&A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3rgtmID8n8 Event Photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/143414768@N07/albums/72157678218150667 Echo360 Two-Pane Video Stream: https://echo360.org/section/df8345ec-7d0c-4dc3-b450-65a423c24650/public Thumbnail Image Credit: NASA JPL/Caltech http://hubblesite.org/image/3881/category/72-open-clusters