One of the most amazing things about the universe is that chaotic dark molecular clouds collapse and form highly organized stars, planets, and life. Scientists are able to simulate the formation, main sequence phase, and death of stars and have confirmed their models with telescope observations. There are somewhere between tens of thousands to millions of images online of stars forming in dark molecular clouds from Hubble telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory.
Giant blue stars formed in the early universe and became the black holes at the centers of galaxies. They would not have formed were it not for clumps of dark matter drawing clouds of hydrogen and helium toward gravitational centers. Scientists plot the structure of dark matter in the early universe by looking at the positions of galaxies in the present universe.
Spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way constantly create star forming regions in dark molecular clouds. These stellar nurseries in which stars are born are some of the most beautiful objects in the universe. Scientists investigate stellar nurseries with infrared and other wavelengths of light in order to observe star formation within the clouds.
Astronomers classify stars based on size and temperature. In the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, giant blue stars are in the upper left, the sun is in the center, and small red stars are in the lower right. The sun is a middle of the road G star.
The sun formed in a dark molecular cloud after a super nova shock wave triggered the collapse of the cloud. It heated up due to the energy of contraction until the initiation of nuclear fusion in the core and the main sequence phase. The sun was 20% cooler when the Earth formed and is slowly growing in luminosity. The main sequence phase will last for 9 billion years.
Chemical tagging is a scientific technique that compares the elements in a star to the elements in other stars in order to determine whether they originated in the same star cluster. The most likely birth environment of the sun, based on chemical tagging, is old open cluster M67, which also has a time of origin consistent with that of the sun. There are a few scientific problems associated with the origin of the sun in M67. First, the sun would have needed to exit this dense cluster quickly in order for the planets to form. Second, it is highly unlikely that the sun would be in its current orbit in the galaxy if it originated in M67.
One of the most interesting studies in astronomy is star death. After the main sequence phase when star convert hydrogen to helium, stars enter a sequence of processes that ultimately end with the death of the star. Large stars end as super red giants and then supernovae. Stars the size of the sun become red giants before ending as white dwarfs.
Moses described six "days" or periods of formation of our world. In his first day, Moses described the earth as formless in a dark cloud, the natural formation of light, and a miracle in which God separated light from darkness. How does this compare with the 21st century model of the a dark molecular cloud (darkness), formation of the sun (light), and the necessary separation of the sun from the dense cluster of stars in which it formed?
Stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Credit: ESA, NASA