this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2026
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Has it already happened?

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[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 21 points 2 days ago

It has certainly happened. We know of stars that are younger than humans.

But has someone directly observed this happening? Well, it depends. As already noted, star formation takes a long time. It's not like dark, cold dust suddenly collapses and ignites into a star. During the formation process, the dust is compressed, and as you might recall, as volume decreases on a mass, pressure and temperature increase. As it heats up, it starts emitting radiation. So it's possible to observe this even before becoming a true main sequence star. And we have definitely observed a lot of those, and if you go outside and point your sufficiently powerful telescope in the right direction, you too can see one with your own eyes!

https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/49792/has-the-birth-of-a-new-star-ever-been-observed-scientifically-speaking