Here is an artist's conception of "Dusky Disks" and their influence on star formation.

Developing stars spin so fast that, left unchecked, they would never fully contract and become stars. Astronomers had theorized that dusty disks might be slowing the super speedy stars by yanking on their magnetic fields. When a star's fields pass through a disk, they are thought to get bogged down like a spoon in molasses. This locks a star's rotation to the slower-turning disk, so the shrinking star can't spin faster. Spitzer is an infrared observatory that can find the swirling disks around stars, because dust in the disks is heated by starlight and glows at infrared wavelengths. Spitzer observed nearly 500 young stars in the Orion nebula. Stars divided into slow spinners and fast spinners, and it was determined that the slow spinners are five times more likely to have disks than the fast ones. "We can now say that disks play some kind of role in slowing down stars in at least one region, but there could be a host of other factors operating in tandem. And stars might behave differently in different environments". Other factors that contribute to a star's winding down over longer periods of time include stellar winds and possibly full-grown planets.