What do protostars turn into

In some places, the interstellar medium is collected into a big cloud of dust and gas called a nebula. A nebula can be many light years across. It is in these nebulae that dust and gas can come together to form stars.

A star is not truly a star until it can fuse hydrogen into helium. Before that, they are called Protostars. A protostar is formed as gravity begins to pull the gases together into a ball. Unfortunately these objects are shrouded in dust, and impossible to see with Earth-based observatories. They can be seen in infrared telescopes though, which can pierce through the veil of dust that shrouds them.

As the collapse continues, a disk of gas forms around the protostar, and bi-polar jets blast out from the top and bottom of the star. These produce spectacular shock waves in the clouds. An object can be considered a protostar as long as material is still falling inward. Protostars are usually surrounded by dust, which blocks the light that they emit, so they are difficult to observe in the visible spectrum. Sometimes the formation of stars can be encouraged or sped up by disturbances in the gas clouds that compress the gas such as other nearby stars or supernovae.

As the cloud collapses, is begins to spin and by the time a protostar is formed, the cloud flattens and there is a protostellar disk spinning around the protostar. These disks probably slow the rotation of the protostar, and sometimes coalesce into planetary systems. As the protostar rotates, it generates a strong magnetic field. The magnetic field also generates a strong protostellar wind, which is an outward flow of particles into space. Many protostars also send out high-speed streams or jets of gas into space.

All stars at the beginning of their lives start off as molecular clouds of dust and gas. Some event will cause the gas to collapse in on itself and begin the process of turning into a star. The cause of the collapse could be a passing star that disturbs the cloud or an explosion from a supernova. Our Sun was once a molecular cloud many billions of years ago and then an event occurred that caused the cloud to collapse. Another way to call a Protostar is a Pre-star, not yet a star but has moved on from being just a cloud.

Imagine the life of a star as a person. If a fully grown star is an adult, a Protostar is a child, one that is still growing and trying to find its way in the Universe. The Protostar is not yet an adult or in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, a main sequence star.

So therefore if a Protostar is a child, the main sequence phase of its life is the Adult phase. When the molecular cloud has begun to collapse, it creates a Protostar, one that is not yet started nuclear fusion, that is to turn hydrogen into helium because it is too small and doesn't have enough mass to which to generate the necessary fusion.

A Protostar needs to get to a temperature of 10 million degrees kelvin for fusion to occur. Utah University. A star like The Sun could take about 50 Million Years to get to the next phase. It all depends on the mass, the higher the mass, the quicker the time, the less mass, the longer the time, ICO.