UC Berkeley professor Gibor Basri studies brown dwarves - cool objects that are not quite planets, not quite stars. But before we could get to the strange phenomena of these deuterium and lithium fusers, we had to cover some basics. How do you tell the difference between a planet and a star? Is it thier formation, their location, or something else entirely? The answer is fuzzier than you would expect - and requires us to take a trip into the dark, cool reaches of our galaxy, where stars and planets alike are being formed in the safety of the nebular nurseries hidden in the dark arms of our pinwheel Milky Way. There we discover that star formation, often spoken of as an exclusively gravitational process, is midwifed by chemistry, electricity, and magnetism. Come explore what happens in the dark, cold reaches of space, and how the darkness gives rise to light.    #astronomy #astrophysics #paradigmshift

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