Lewis Andrews

Visualisations into the formations of new star systems. Immense gas molecular clouds within the Cosmos eventually begin to collapse with the help of gravity after a disturbance such as a nearby supernova. The cloud becomes denser and the temperature begins to rise until it reaches a point where the temperature is so high that it overcomes the atom's urge to stay apart, igniting nuclear fusion.

 

A Star is born.

 

This process is the same process our own solar system went through billions of years ago. Stars are being born across the universe right now. When we look into the cosmos, we can see stellar nurseries teeming with newborn stars surrounded by dense clouds of gas and dust collapsing around them into protoplanetary disks. 

 

These protoplanetary disks are theorised to go on to form the newborn solar system’s planets although we struggle to see the formations due to the density of the clouds. New studies have revealed however how much of a chemical soup is within these protoplanetary disks. In 2021, Astronomers using the ALMA(Atacama large millimeter / submillimeter Array) mapped out 18 organic and inorganic molecules within the protoplanetary disks of the young stars GM Aur, HD 163296, MWC 480, IM Lup and AS 209. Each disk was discovered to contain a varying amount of molecules rather than a specific amount in each disk suggesting that the resulting planets would have a diversity of the molecules depending on their location within the disk. Studies like these open up theories about the origins of not only our chemical compositions here on Earth but also the origins of molecules responsible for life here on Earth.