ALMA tagged posts

Researchers have uncovered new insights into the early development of baby stars...

A team of 48 astronomers from 14 countries, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has discovered a population of dusty, star-forming galaxies at the far edges of the universe that formed only a billion years after the Big Bang, believed to have occurred 13.7 billion years ago. The galaxies may represent a snapshot in the galactic life cycle, linking recently discovered ultradistant bright galaxies formed 13.3 billion years ago with early “quiescent” (dead) galaxies that stopped forming stars about two billion years after the Big Bang.

Challenging what we know about cosmos
The new discovery challenges current models of the universe, making the f...

Black holes are notorious for gobbling up everything that comes their way, but astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered that even supermassive black holes can be picky eaters, and this can have a significant impact on their growth.

This discovery, now published in The Astrophysical Journal, was made by an international team of astronomers led by Makoto A. Johnstone, a Ph.D. candidate with the University of Virginia. The team used ALMA to study seven nearby galaxy mergers hosting supermassive black holes separated by only a few thousand light-years.

How galaxy mergers affect black holes
When two massive, gas-rich galaxies merge, gravity drives vast amounts of cold molecular gas toward the centers of both systems, where supermassive ...

The discovery of ancient water in a planet-forming disk reveals that some of the water found in comets—and maybe even Earth—is older than the disk’s star itself, offering breakthrough insights into the history of water in our solar system.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have made a first-ever detection of doubly deuterated water (D₂O, or “heavy water”) in a planet-forming disk around V883 Ori, a young star...