What gases are needed to make a star?

It depends on the kind of star you want to make.

Basically, what you really need is hydrodgen; as soon as enough hydrodgen is gathered somewhere and collapse, you end up with a star.

But, if you just have hydrodgen, you will get a very massive star, and with a history different than the stars observed in the local Universe. Why so?

• hydrodgen is a poor coolant, therefore the Jeans' mass (the minimum mass for a density structure to gravitationally collapse), which strongly depends on temperature, will be much higher if the temperature is higher. In practice, it means that the formed stars will be much more massive.


• you need at least a small fraction of carbon to launch the CNO cycle in stellar cores (CNO cycle is one of the two ways to burn hydrodgen and to turn it into helium); stellar cores are then hotter and denser, and stars become hotter and more luminous.

So if you want to make a star as we typically observe in our galaxy, you will need also some molecules (hopefully there are plenty of them) and also some carbon. Else, you'll get big, massive, hot and luminous stars. Like the first generation of stars (called Population III stars, you can see here if you want more dirty details) in the early Universe.