Birth of stars

let's imagine we have a huge cloud of hydrogen atoms floating in space Hugh and I say huge cloud huge both in distance and in mass if you were to combine all of the hydrogen atoms it would just be this really really massive thing so you have this huge cloud well we know that gravity would make the atoms actually attracted to each other instantly we normally don't think about the gravity of atoms but it would slowly affect these atoms and they'd slowly draw close to each other it would slowly condense they'd slowly they slowly move towards the center of mass of all of the atoms they'd slowly move in and so if we fast forward if we fast forward this cloud is going to get denser and denser it's going to get denser and denser and the hydrogen atoms are going to start bumping into each other and rubbing up against each other and interacting with each other and so it's going to get denser and denser and denser and remember was a huge mass of hydrogen atoms so the temperature is going up the temperature is going up and it'll they'll keep condensing they'll just keep condensing and condensing until something really interesting happens so let's imagine that they've gotten really dense here in the center they've gotten really dense here in the center and there's a bunch of hydrogen atoms all over it's really dense I could never draw the actual number of atoms here this is really give you an idea there's a huge amount of inward pressure from gravity from everything that wants to get to that center of mass of our entire cloud the temperature here the temperature here is approaching 10 million Kelvin and at that point something neat happens it to kind of realize the neat thing that's happening let's remember what a hydrogen atom looks like a hydrogen and even more I'm just going to focus on the hydrogen nucleus so the hydrogen nucleus is a proton if you want to think about a hydrogen atom it also has an electron orbiting around or floating around and let's draw another hydrogen atom over here and obviously this distance isn't to scale this distance is also not to scale atoms are actually the nucleus of atoms are actually much much much much smaller than the actual radius of an atom and so is the electron but anyway this just gives you an idea so we know from the Coulomb forces from electromagnetic forces that these two positively charged nucleus is will not want to get anywhere near each other but we do know from ours from what we learned about the four force is that if they did get close enough to each other that if they did get if somehow they're under huge temperatures and huge pressures you were able to get these two protons close enough to each other then all of a sudden the strong force will overtake it's much stronger than the Coulomb force and that these two hydrogen's will actually these this these nucleuses would actually fuse or that nuclei well anyway they would actually fuse together and so that is what actually happens once this gets hot and dense enough you now have enough pressure enough temperature to overcome the Coulomb force and bring these protons close enough to each other for fusion to occur for fusion fusion ignition ignition and the reason why is and I want to be very careful it's not ignition it's not combustion in the traditional sense it's not like you're burning a carbon molecule with out in the presence of oxygen it's not combustion it's ignition and the reason why it's called ignition is because when two of these protons or two of the nucleus is fuse the resulting the resulting nucleus has a slightly smaller mass and so in the first stage of this you actually have you actually have two protons two protons under enough pressure obviously this would not happen with just the Coulomb forces at with enough pressure to get close enough and then the strong interaction actually actually keeps them together one of these guys degrades in a neutron degrades into a neutron and the resulting mass of the combined protons is lower than the mass of each of the original by a little bit but that a little bit of mass results in a lot of energy plus plus energy and this energy is why we call it ignition and so what this energy does is it provides a little bit of outward pressure so that this thing doesn't keep keep collapsing so once you get pressure enough the fusion occurs and then that energy provides outward pressure to what is now a star what is now a star so now we are at where we actually have the ignition at the center we have and we still have all of the other molecules trying to get in providing the pressure for this fusion ignition now what is the hydrogen being fused into well on the first step of the first step of the reaction and I'm just kind of doing the most basic type of fusion that exhibit ours the hydrogen gets fused into deuterium deuterium of trouble spelling which is another way of calling heavy hydrogen this is still hydrogen because it has one proton and one Neutron now it is not helium yet it does not have two it does not have two protons but then the deuterium keeps fusing and then we eventually end up with and then we end up with helium and we can even see that on the periodic table I lost my periodic table well I'll show you in the next video but we know hydrogen hydrogen hydrogen in its atomic state has an atomic number of one and it also has a mass of one it only has one nucleon and it's nucleus but it's being fused it goes to hydrogen too which is deuterium which is one Neutron one proton in its nucleus two nucleons and then that eventually gets fused and I'm not going to the detail of the reaction into helium and by definition helium has two protons and two neutrons so it has or we're talking about helium four in particular that isotope of helium it has an atomic mass of four and the whole this process releases a ton of energy because the atomic mass of the helium that gets produced is slightly lower than four of its of the atomic four times the atomic mass of each of the Constituent hydrogen's so all of this energy all of this energy from the fusion but it needs super high pressure super high temperatures to happen keeps keeps the star from collapsing and once the star is in in this stage once it is once it is using hydrogen it is fusing hydrogen in its core where the pressure and the temperatures of most to form helium it is now in its main sequence this is now a main sequence star main main sequence star and that's actually where the Sun is right now now there's there's questions of well what if what if there just wasn't enough mass to get to this level over here and there actually are things that never get to that quite that threshold to fuse all the way into helium there are a few things that don't quite make the threshold of stars that only fuse to this level so they are generating some of their eat or there are even smaller objects that just get to the point there's a huge temperature and pressure but fusion is not actually occurring inside of the core and something like Jupiter would be an example and you can go several several masses above Jupiter where you get something like that so you have to reach a certain threshold or the mass where the pressure and the temperature due to the heavy mass gets so large that you start this fusion at but the smaller you have above that threshold this the slower the fusion will occur but if you're supermassive the fusion will occur really really fast so that's a general idea of just how stars get formed and why they don't collapse on themselves and why they are these kind of little balls of fusion reactions existing in the universe and the next few videos we'll talk about what happens once that hydrogen fuel and the cure in the core starts to run out