ALMA tagged posts

ALMA resolves Gas impacted by Young Jets from Supermassive Black Hole

Reconstructed images of what MG J0414+0534 would look like if gravitational lensing effects were turned off. The emissions from dust and ionized gas around a quasar are shown in red. The emissions from carbon monoxide gas are shown in green, which have a bipolar structure along the jets.
Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), K. T. Inoue et al.

Astronomers obtained the first resolved image of disturbed gaseous clouds in a galaxy 11 billion light-years away by using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The team found that the disruption is caused by young powerful jets ejected from a supermassive black hole residing at the center of the host galaxy. This result will cast light on the mystery of the evolutionary process of galaxies in the early Universe.

It is commonly k...

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Massive Gas Disk raises questions about Planet Formation Theory

20191223_Higuchi_49Ceti_ALMA_separated_E
ALMA image of the debris disk around the young star 49 Ceti. The distribution of dust is shown in red; the distribution of carbon monoxide is shown in green; and the distribution of carbon atoms is shown in blue.
Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Higuchi et al.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) found a young star surrounded by an astonishing mass of gas. The star, called 49 Ceti, is 40 million years old and conventional theories of planet formation predict that the gas should have disappeared by that age. The enigmatically large amount of gas requests a reconsideration of our current understanding of planet formation.

Planets are formed in gaseous dusty disks called protoplanetary disks around young stars...

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ALMA spots most distant Dusty Galaxy Hidden in Plain Sight

Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, B. Saxton

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have spotted the light of a massive galaxy seen only 970 million years after the Big Bang. This galaxy, called MAMBO-9, is the most distant dusty star-forming galaxy that has ever been observed without the help of a gravitational lens.

Dusty star-forming galaxies are the most intense stellar nurseries in the universe. They form stars at a rate up to a few thousand times the mass of the Sun per year (the star-forming rate of our Milky Way is just three solar masses per year) and they contain massive amounts of gas and dust...

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ALMA dives into Black Hole’s ‘Sphere of Influence’

Telescope (NASA/ESA); Carnegie-Irvine Galaxy Survey

ALMA has made the most precise measurements of cold gas swirling around a supermassive black hole – the cosmic behemoth at the center of the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 3258. What happens inside a black hole stays inside a black hole, but what happens inside a black hole’s “sphere of influence” – the innermost region of a galaxy where a black hole’s gravity is the dominant force – is of intense interest to astronomers and can help determine the mass of a black hole as well as its impact on its galactic neighborhood.

Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) provide an unprecedented close-up view of a swirling disk of cold interstellar gas rotating around a supermassive black hole...

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