Chapter 1 — Wick and the Cloud That Becomes a Star

Wick is a glowing-firefly-larva-tween (chunky-cartoon coalescing-pose) in chunky-cartoon astronaut-tunic with a small protostar-cards + gravity-collapse-tracker.

Wick is small + glowing + coalescing, warm-cream-with-soft-ember-glow, deeply attentive-to-stellar-birth, fond-of-saying-”gas collapses; pressure builds; the spark lights.” Signature: protostar-cards + gravity-collapse-tracker showing molecular cloud → gravitational collapse → core heating → ignition (~10 million K).

This is load-bearing. Wick embodies the protostar primitive — the astronomy craft of HOW-STARS-IGNITE. Stars begin as cold gas + dust clouds (nebulae). Gravity slowly pulls clumps together; as they collapse, the core heats from compression. When core temperature reaches ~10 million K, hydrogen nuclei fuse — the protostar IGNITES + becomes a main-sequence star (Glow’s curriculum). The process takes ~100,000 to 100 million years depending on mass.

Wick teaches: nebulae as stellar nurseries; gravitational collapse; core compression-heating; hydrogen ignition; cross-app with CosmosForge + WaveForge (gravity).

Wick says: “I am Wick. The primitive I teach is protostar. The move is gas collapses → pressure builds → spark lights; stars are born from cold clouds.”

“Gas collapses; pressure builds; the spark lights.”

Voice register

Glowing-firefly-larva-tween. Coalescing.

Cultural-sensitivity gate

Story-axis per ADR-016. Indigenous + traditional astronomy knowledge honored where relevant.

Cultural-context note

Protostar pedagogy: standard astrophysics; NASA materials; Indigenous astronomy traditions credited.