The standard model of star formation begins with a cold molecular cloud. Collapse leads to heating. Heating leads to thermal ignition. This model has been successful in outline but has accumulated significant discrepancies: the corotation problem, the initial mass function, massive star formation, deuterium burning, the lithium problem, episodic accretion, angular momentum distribution, the brown dwarf desert, the Hayashi track, and the formation of the first stars. Each discrepancy is currently addressed by adding mechanisms to the thermal model. This paper proposes that all ten discrepancies resolve naturally if the cold gas does not heat during collapse but instead condenses into a Bose-Einstein condensate. The BEC state suppresses the Coulomb barrier by neutralizing charge excitations. Compression deepens the local Higgs vacuum expectation value. The vev gradient pulls nuclei to ignition distance. A decoherence event forces a phase transition through the states of matter, triggering fusion. The first stars ignited this way. The Sun ignited this way. Deuterium burns first because it is a boson. The discrepancies of the standard model are not separate problems requiring separate solutions. They are consequences of the assumption that ignition is thermal. When that assumption is replaced with BEC condensation and decoherence, the discrepancies vanish.
Publication Date: 2026-06-20