How stars are born

Our modern ideas about star formation date back to Immanuel Kant’s nebular hypothesis of 1755. Over the past 270 years, advances in telescopes and computing have allowed us to confirm and add details to our understanding of the process.

Star formation begins with an interstellar cloud of cold gas and dust which has started to collapse under its own gravity. The contracting cloud forms an accretion disc with a protostar at its centre. As the star evolves, the cloud dissipates revealing the newly formed star. The dust within the disc clumps together, leading to the formation of a planetary system.

Andy will explain our current understanding of star formation and how it connects with his research into the distribution of star formation and starspots on young stars.

Dr Andrew Wilson, University of Exeter

Andy Wilson has been interested in astronomy since the 1980s. After studying Astronomy and Physics at UCL in the 1990s and working in IT, he returned to academia in 2001, completing a mathematics degree with the Open University and a PhD in astronomy at the University of Exeter in 2024. He is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Exeter, researching star formation and young stars. His work involves the WEAVE spectrograph on the William Herschel Telescope, machine-learning analysis of star formation in the Milky Way, and spectroscopic studies of starspots using the Very Large Telescope. He is also active in amateur astronomy through the British Astronomical Association, managing variable star photometry and spectroscopy databases.