A star begins in the coldest place around: a molecular cloud at some 10 to 20 K, so dark it shows up only by blotting out the stars behind it. Six stages follow one another as infalling gas spins up and flattens into an accretion disk, Herbig-Haro jets fire along the rotation axis, and a T Tauri wind clears the dusty envelope before fusion finally lights. At a core mass of 0.05 solar masses the ending changes: it never reaches 10 million K, and only a brown dwarf is left.
A star begins in the coldest place around: a molecular cloud at some 10 to 20 K, so dark it shows up only by blotting out the stars behind it. Six stages follow one another as infalling gas spins up and flattens into an accretion disk, Herbig-Haro jets fire along the rotation axis, and a T Tauri wind clears the dusty envelope before fusion finally lights. At a core mass of 0.05 solar masses the ending changes: it never reaches 10 million K, and only a brown dwarf is left.
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