Researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Texas at Austin have for the first time performed a computer simulation of star formation from stellar gas clouds that includes all of the physical phenomena that are believed to influence the process. The simulation, called STARFORGE, took months to execute on a supercomputer. The actual process of star formation takes millions of years in gas clouds containing material capable of making a million stars the size of the Sun.
One of the questions that the researchers sought to answer is whether the process of star formation put any limits on the size of stars. Previous simulations (which did not include all factors affecting the process) produced stars, on average, with masses about 10 times as large as what it observed in the universe. One of the processes included in STARFORGE, but not in previous simulations, is the production of gas jets from the newborn stars emanating from their poles. It appears that the inclusion of gas jets brings the average star mass down to about the right level.
The researchers created a film of their simulation:
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