Issues of 2008

This page lists the home pages for this web site for the year 2008. These pages constitute volume 5 of The Astrophysics Spectator.

• Issue 5.08, May 5  At the beginning of its life, a star is powered purely by its own self-gravity.  Such a star is called a protostar.  The page added to the web site with this issue discusses the structure and evolution of the protostar.
• Issue 5.07, April 18  The birth of binary stars is the subject of a page added with this issue.
• Issue 5.06, April 4  This issue continues the discussion of binary star systems with a page on the “Stars” topical path that describes the basic properties of binary stars.
• Issue 5.05  A page is added to the “Stars” topical path that describes how the masses of stars in a binary system are derived.
• Issue 5.04, February 29  A page is added to the Milky Way Galaxy path that describes how the mass density of the local Galactic disk is measured.
• Issue 5.03, February 18  Molecular clouds collapse to form stars, but how this collapse occurs is not settled in the scientific community.  This update of the web site adds a page that describes the two theories for the gravitational collapse of molecular clouds.  A page discussing the Jeans length is also updated in this issue.
• Issue 5.02, January 30  Stars are born in the collapse of molecular clouds.   This issue adds to the web site a page that describes the molecular cloud and a page that describes the Jeans length and mass, which give the natural size of a gravitationally-bound system.
• Issue 5.01, January 16  This first issue of the year adds two pages to the web site that describe the material that fills the space between the stars.  The first page is an introduction to the interstellar medium.  The second page describes why the interstellar medium is segregated into cool, dense clouds surrounded by warm, tenuous gas.