the.com/cosmic formation
the universe's long habit of turning nothing into something, then something into everything.
means the process by which structures like stars, galaxies, and planets emerge from primordial gas and gravity over billions of years.
from the term traces to 20th-century astrophysics once telescopes and spectroscopy let scientists watch gas clouds collapse into stars, extending darwinian-style formation language from geology to the sky itself.
first lightstars ignited roughly 100 million years after the big bang
raw materialmostly hydrogen, the universe's laziest, most abundant element
still happeningnew stars form in the milky way right now
gravity's patiencegalaxies took hundreds of millions of years to assemble