Abstract
Now that we have discussed the life and death of stars, we should say a few words about their birth as well. Stars form out of gas clouds when gravity conquers pressure, causing the clouds to collapse and fragment into pieces that can become individual solar systems. The process is complicated, and we will not try to capture all of the details, but with some judicious simplifications we can elucidate the key physics.
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We neglected the self gravity of the disk when modeling disk temperature in Sect. 19.4.1, but we cannot neglect it when discussing how planets form.
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Earth does have light molecules in the form of oceans and atmosphere, but they do not invalidate the general argument because they constitute a tiny fraction of Earth’s mass. Also, evidence from isotopic ratios suggests that Earth received at least some of its water from planetesimals and comets that formed farther out in the protoplanetary disk (see [8] and references therein).
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This question is inspired in part by an analysis in the book by Maoz [2].
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Keeton, C. (2014). Star and Planet Formation. In: Principles of Astrophysics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9236-8_19
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