This is Part 1 of Cave Nebula Explanation - read this part first...
Here is presented both an RGB and HSO (using the Block/Cranfield narrowband colour technique) of the Cave Nebula star forming region. In my eye both make very nice pictures and the narrowband colourization technique provides a more consistent colourization method than created using the Hubble narrowband palette. However, when one it trying to delineate the structure and position of the molecular cloud it is helpful to have both images. This image was taken to further my understanding of star formation, and test if I could see if dust and gases always flow together in a strongly coupled manner in star forming regions. Much of the journey that hydrogen molecules undertake in transforming from a member of a diffuse gaseous cloud with completely collective where gravity is almost completely negligible to a dense metallic spherical protostar under enormous gravitationally driven pressure is not well understood. It is almost as if nature doesn’t want us to know how it happens, at least not exactly, by shrouding the process in dust so we can’t see it, and making the conditions and scales under which a protostar forms beyond laboratory reproducibility. Numerical modelling is also of limited utility in understanding star formation and the process appears to be too chaotic and complex for computation, and in the end, models only echo what you want them to say anyways. That doesn’t mean we cannot, at least, paint a fuzzy picture of what the prototstar formation should look like by considering a number of scientific principles/disciplines and hopefully combine them into a consistent story that makes sense. In this description, I choose to take a thermodynamic approach to the problem, because we know that the process must be consistent under the laws of thermodynamics in order to be viable. The thermodynamic description consists of mapping the state of hydrogen molecules as they move from a low temperature, ultra low pressure gas phase to a high temperature and pressure protostar through temperature and pressure space on Pressure-Temperature diagram. For a single substance, in this case hydrogen, its position on a PT diagram completely defines the microstate properties, such as density, phase (gas/liquid,etc.), viscosity, heat content, entropy, of the substance at equilibrium. I am showing two phase diagrams (one linear, and one logarithmic) to sketch out what I believe are the three steps to protostar creation marked on the phase diagrams: - cooling and compression at very low pressure/density;
- phase change to form a dense protostar nucleus; increase in pressure and density at low T
- hydrogen accumulation around the nucleus by gravitation forces increase in T and P
