Chalnoth, what is the force that drives diffusion?” Is it not kinetic energy? “Diffusion is defined as the spreading out from a concentrated source which results in an increase in the entropy (degree of disorder) of the substance. Diffusion occurs because of the random movement of molecules of the substance which allows them to separate from one another. The greater the space between these molecules the greater the ability for the molecular particles to spread out from one another.” Are you still willing to stand by your assertion that a star has greater entropy than a gas cloud? Is there any molecule more diffusive than H2?
There is no force that drives diffusion. None. Diffusion happens because molecules in a gas are more or less moving in random directions, and the net effect, when the gas is not being acted on by gravity, is to spread out. Gravity changes things, by generating a net attractive force. If there are enough molecules within a region, then they collapse.
Look, if your claims were right, then stars
could not exist. And yet they do. Funny, that.
And yes, I absolutely stand by my claim that a star has greater entropy than a diffuse gas cloud of the same mass.
Chalnoth, picture for a moment a group of engineers trying to hypercompress hydrogen gas. To compress hydrogen, it takes an exponentially greater amount of energy to linearly increase the pressure of hydrogen gas. Compression of hydrogen gas increases its temperature, and the kinetic energy is by far the greatest obstacle to compression well before intermolecular electromagnetic forces come into play, as you indirectly point out above. Can you conceive of human beings able to compress hydrogen gas in a tank so much that they ignite a fusion reaction? Can gravity by itself cause more compression than what engineers can do on earth?. Any compression solutions that human engineers come up with isn’t available in interstellar space. Gravity is an incredibly weak force compared to the forces working against it.
Yes, gravity by itself can cause
vastly more compression than what human engineers can do on the Earth, because gas clouds are vastly, vastly more massive than the Earth. For example, our Sun is over
three hundred thousand times as massive as the Earth. All that weight, even if it is mostly hydrogen, adds up.
I’m glad you’ve repudiated the supernova theory of star formation. A lot of otherwise intelligent scientists have believed that to be a credible theory. I would also direct you to my previous post regarding the incredible lack of density in gas clouds. A given gas cloud may have a lot of mass, but that mass will not avail it if it’s spread out across lightyears of cubic volume. Jupiter is a THOUSAND TRILLION TRILLION times more dense than the gas cloud I calculated in an earlier post. I don’t see no fusion reactions on Jupiter. Scientists that infer star formation in gas clouds are looking at tea leaves. Unless we see some sort of hurricane structure around the star, sucking gas into it, the conventional theory must be discarded. The creationist theory, by contrast, makes great intuitive sense.
I haven't repudiated it. Just stated that it's a minor effect. It can't be the primary cause of star formation, because you need stars to have supernovae.
Yes, interstellar gas clouds are very diffuse. But all you need is one region of the gas cloud to be ever so slightly more dense than the rest, and it will collapse into a star, provided there's enough mass. Given that there are some 400,000,000,000 stars within our own galaxy alone, total mass isn't the problem: you just need a slight disturbance to cause that mass to collapse in on itself.
And Jupiter just doesn't have enough mass to generate a fusion reaction: the pressure doesn't get high enough.
Finally, the way we infer usually star formation is by looking at the ages of stars. We don't necessarily look for
current star formation, but
recent star formation. When you have a star-forming region, the stars tend to form of all sorts of different masses. The low-mass stars can last for billions of years, while the high-mass stars will only last for tens to hundreds of millions (basically, the higher mass allows for increased pressure, which in turn causes the nuclear furnaces at their centers to burn much faster). So when we see a region where there's lots of big, massive stars, we know that region recently underwent some star formation.
And, just as we would expect, the strongest star forming regions are typically in the presence of interactions. For example, when two galaxies collide, the collisions of the gas clouds cause many stars to form.