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What happens when a REAL star is born -- after this.

November 22  A Star Is Born

We know that stars don't last forever.  They're born from vast clouds
of gas and dust in interstellar space.  They live millions or billions
of years -- and then they die, sometimes fading slowly into darkness
like the embers of a dying fire.

But it's not easy to watch the evolution of stars -- since they live
many millions of times longer than we do.  When we look out into the
galaxy, we see stars at different stages of their evolution.  It's sort
of like looking at snapshots of people, all at different ages.  Putting
all the snapshots together helps us learn the big picture on how stars
live out their lives.

And the picture gets clearer all the time.  Recently, astronomers
discovered what they say is a star in the process of being born.  We
know many places in the galaxy where stars probably are forming -- many
huge clouds of interstellar gas and dust.  But now some astronomers say
they've gotten a look at the birth process -- a process in which
fragments of the clouds collapse to form stars.

The developing star is located about 500 light-years away in the
constellation Ophiuchus.  Using a radio telescope at very high radio
frequencies, astronomers can see for the first time that the inner
cloud is falling into the star -- adding to the star's mass -- and
making it glow.  Eventually, perhaps a hundred thousand years from now,
the developing star will be massive enough for thermonuclear fusion
reactions to "turn on" in its core.  These reactions are what enable
most stars to shine for most of their lives.  All stars eventually die
-- but on the average about one new star is born every year somewhere
in our galaxy.

Script by Deborah Byrd.
(c) Copyright 1985, 1986 McDonald Observatory, University of Texas at Austin