I just had a religious experience. Or, at least as close as I’m going to get to one.
It was over a TV program called “The Sun” — a show so minor, The Science Channel doesn’t even have a web page for it. In it, Dr. Paul Scowen of Arizona State University described the simple process by which our universe went from a soup of positively-charged quanta of energy, each orbited by its own negatively-charged, smaller unit of energy, to you at this very moment reading these words. Stopping to consider that, I was reminded of just how elegant and beautiful the universe is. And it all started with a cloud of atoms.
It will sit there for thousands, and in some cases, millions of years… What you need to do to get the star formation process going is you need to kick it with something. That can be an impact on the cloud from one side by a supernova blast wave — a massive star has gone boom at the end of its life, and that sends out in all directions, very energetic compression waves that hit the gas and compresses it.
The first stars formed out of dense clouds of hydrogen. Then, when they died, their supernovas sent out shockwaves to jumpstart the creation of another generation of stars. It’s a perfectly simple method for increasing complexity in the universe, and it all runs automatically!