Star Formation

Star Formation

The lives of the stars a constant battle between gravity trying to pull the star's gas inwards and the pressure of the gas pushing outwards. The battle starts when gravity begins to collapse a small part of a cold, dusty interstellar gas cloud. As it falls in, the temperature at the core rises and the protostar flares into life as infrared source buried deep in the cloud. Eventually the collapse slows, hydrogen begins to fuse into helium, the star 'burns' through the surrounding gas, and the star finally settles into the life of a main sequence star.

Current research areas

Disks around Young Stars
Dramatic images taken in the infra-red reveal rings and disks of dust and gas swirling around newly-formed stars. The images, taken by Peter Tuthill, use optical interferometry on the Keck Telescope, currently the world's largest. See images and more information at Peter Tuthill's web page.

Star Formation in nearby face-on spiral galaxies
Building on earlier work, an Honours thesis by Madhura Killedar, supervised by John O'Byrne focussed on a pixel-by-pixel comparison of UV and H-alpha images of several nearby face-on spiral galaxies. The flux between these two bands can be compared with model predictions to yield estimates of the age of star formation tracing out the spiral pattern. For more information see Star Formation in nearby Galaxies.