How are stars made? Where do the gases and other components come from in a vacuum?

Question

How are stars made? Where do the gases and other components come from in a vacuum?

In: 4

Answer 1

Stars are made when giant clouds of gas (mostly hydrogen) and dust in space start to accumulate and condense by gravity. As this ball of gas gets more massive and more condensed, the pressure and temperature in the center become so high that the hydrogen atoms start fusing into helium atoms. This is what a star is – a giant ball of gas undergoing nuclear fusion.

All of the hydrogen and most of the helium that stars are made of formed in the first few hundred thousand years after the big bang. Other heavier elements were made later in supernovas or other cosmological events like the collisions of neutron stars.