Gravity and pressure from the surrounding interstellar medium work to make clouds collapse, but angular momentum, turbulence, magnetic fields, stellar winds, and
radiation pressure push back.
He speculated the mysterious sockets might have been formed by stars that exerted enough
radiation pressure to push away dust and gas.
When a massive star forms today, its intense outpouring of radiation pushes against infalling material, which is enriched in heavy elements and dust that are more easily blown away by
radiation pressure. As a result, this process shuts off further accretion, limiting a star's mass to perhaps 120 Suns at most.
Radiation pressure from the beam traps a few spheres against the top plate.
The planned 850-km orbit was high enough that solar
radiation pressure of about 5 micropascals (7 x [10.sup.-10] pounds per square inch) would have helped create a resulting thrust of 0.03 Newton (kilogram meter per second squared).
Radiation pressure from starlight either blows small dust grains out of the system or drags the dust into the star, effectively sweeping the system clean in just a thousand years or less.
Stellar
radiation pressure should quickly blow such small grains out of the system, so Su's team suspects that they come from recent collisions.
These winds consist of atoms from the atmosphere of the star, which are driven by intense
radiation pressure to velocities approaching one percent of the speed of light.
The dust must be continuously replenished by collisions of larger bodies, since such small particles are quickly cleared out by
radiation pressure from the central star.
Located 165,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the nebula N11B shows the whole starbirth process from beginning to end: amorphous clouds of gas and dust; bright rims where these clouds are compressed by stellar winds and
radiation pressure from bright stars; dense globules where rims have fragmented and started to collapse under their own gravity; protostars lighting up in the cores of globules; and clusters of fully formed hot stars that have driven off their natal clouds to shine free.
Radiation pressure doesn't completely blow a star apart.
radiation pressure - the minute pressure exerted on a surface normal to the direction of propagation of a wave