Youth and abundance where the cup does not overflow:preyed on

The paradox of youth

No it’s not all about you

It’s useful to see how stars form in order to understand the root of this “paradox”. The simple and most basic view of star formation involves a cloud of gas and dust collapsing under its own gravity. This happens as its mass reaches the Jean’s mass, at which point gravity overcomes the expansion of the cloud due to its thermal energy (basically its kinetic energy). Dense areas of the cloud begin to form protostars as matter in the cloud comes together, and these eventually turn into stars.

Either the stars formed somewhere else more distant and then moved near the black hole, or there is a slightly modified process for the formation of these stars that would work near the black hole. These seemingly unlikely processes proposed to explain the presence of the large number of young stars have together been grouped under the name “The Paradox of Youth”.