Tag Archives: stellar astrophysics

The Eddington Luminosity in Spherical Accretion and Beyond

The Eddington luminosity is the point at which the radiation coming out of an object pushes on the surrounding gas as hard as the object’s gravity pulls it in. Above that luminosity, material near the source is pushed away instead … Continue reading

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How a Molecular Cloud Collapses Into a Star

Making a star means compressing gas by something like twenty-four orders of magnitude. The warm neutral interstellar medium, the ordinary atomic gas between the stars, holds roughly a third of a hydrogen atom per cubic centimetre at a temperature of … Continue reading

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