-6. Flashes in the darkness

                                    

                                          
            
                          
Now it's done.
                          
But not completely.
                          
Once heat and pressure are sufficiently high, the mass is no longer a mass and prepares herself for a further spectacular evolution. The result is a protostar, a spheroidal huge accumulation of gas at very high temperature, where reactions of nuclear fusion are however still missing.
                          
Premises are great, but there's no real combustion, just very hot preliminary tests. The environment is electric and strongly unstable, at every slight movement everything swirls, as well as the balance is close but not completed yet. A less gruelling step compared to the ascent one just experienced, where doubts and uncertainties are behind and the goal so visible on the horizon. It's enough to reach it, persisting without deviations on the journey previously undertaken.
                          
But spheroidal doesn't mean spherical. To get to the perfect shape some final heavy hammerings are needed, hurting as well as modelling a shocking beauty never seen before.
                          
The duration of the protostar phase varies again according to the mass of the body on the way; the greater the mass the higher the gravity pull applied, which will be able to accumulate matter and consents faster, reaching in a shorter time the temperature necessary to pass to the next stage of the universal process.
                          
For more talented protostars this passage can be so fast that it can't be realized even by most careful observers. Like during a fire, reactions are uncontrolled and uncontrollable, both in time and space. 'Slow' and 'little' indeed are adjectives totally extraneous to the concept of protostar; more generally trying to impose limits, even virtuous, to their evolutionary path is almost impossible. So it happens that normally it follows an exponential development, where the beginning is uncertain but it accelerates more and more as seconds go by, until to become the first, true, unforgettable, overwhelmingly amazing explosion.
                          
This is not always the case unfortunately. In this competition for evolution victory is not sure even at one centimetre from the finish. Protostars with low mass can't continue the way, while those having too much are equally unable to reach a star destiny. If the critical level isn't achieved competitors gain just the role of promise, all that for an amount of time so long to get them at least bothered.
                          
The protostar realizes to be on the verge of the real beginning and tenaciously keeps on struggling, hardly fighting on all fronts. But of the infinite universe she already breathes the scent and here and there she can't not allow herself some deserved breaks of celestial bliss.
                          
The first real fusion is close, so much that inside her everything is already fire and light.
                          
Better not to ask too many questions, better to let the energy freely flow, savouring in silence the ardent waiting definitively leading to the eternal.