Very cool stuff - but...
"...C'mon now, let's all join in a reverent chorus of Sir Elton Hercules John's "The Circle of Life""
Ooh. Lets, er, not.
Steven R
(nothing to do with me crying when Mufasa dies, every time)
Move over, Lord Vader. A group of astroboffins using Chile's high-desert Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have peered into the Orion Nebula's planetary nursery and discovered that massively powerful stars can be so intense that they blow away any chance of planets forming around new stars being born in their …
No, let's all join in a reverent chorus from Monty Python
"Big". HTH, HAND.
To answer your question: mass isn't enough to create a black hole, you need density as well. If you want to know more about it, watch the 1979 Disney movie The Black Hole. You'll learn nothing about black holes, but it's a really good movie and you'll enjoy yourself a lot more than if you'd spent the same length of time poring over scientific textbooks for relatively useless trivia.
and yet, if I calculated correctly, that's only about 15/1000 of a light year.
obligatory Douglas Adams quote: "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
"But with all that mass, how does it not immediately collapse into a black hole?"
For the same reason the Milky Way doesn't collapse into a black hole: it's all in orbit. Black holes form when a lot of fairly stationary mass (e.g., a star) finds a reason to implode (like a cessation of fusion heat that was keeping it inflated.) The magical moment happens when a sufficient portion of the star's mass gets inside a certain radius.
If everything stays in orbit (or gets blasted away by a neighboring O-type star that can't contain its hot gaseous emissions), then you don't get a black hole.
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Presumably because of the temperature of the gas and dust? It's clear that you can get the density to form big stars.
While the centre of the nebula seems quite unfridly to accretion discs the light pressure will be less away from the core, so you might perhaps get planet formation in the outer reaches of the nebula?