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    ALMA tagged posts

    Planets may start forming before stars even finish growing

    July 3, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    New high-resolution images of protoplanetary disks in the Ophiuchus star-forming region, created with improved analysis. The resolution is shown by the white ellipse in the lower left of each panel, with a smaller ellipse indicating higher resolution. The white line in the lower right of each panel indicates a scale of 30 au. The evolution stage of the central stars progresses from left to right, and from top to bottom in the same row. (Credit: ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), A. Shoshi et al.)

    In a stellar nursery 460 light-years away, astronomers sharpened old ALMA data and spotted crisp rings and spirals swirling around 27 infant stars—evidence that planets start taking shape just a few hundred thousand years after their suns ignite, far earlier than anyone expected.

    Signs of planet fo...

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    Disk discovery changes views on star and planet formation

    April 27, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The combination of theoretical models and empirical data provides a new perspective for understanding the complex interactions between young stars and their environments. Credit: Paolo Padoan, Liubin Pan, Veli-Matti Pelkonen, Troels Haugbølle and Ake Nordlund
    The combination of theoretical models and empirical data provides a new perspective for understanding the complex interactions between young stars and their environments. Credit: Paolo Padoan, Liubin Pan, Veli-Matti Pelkonen, Troels Haugbølle and Ake Nordlund

    A study led by Paolo Padoan, ICREA research professor at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), is challenging the understanding of planetary disk formation around young stars.

    The paper, published in Nature Astronomy, reveals that the environment plays a crucial role in determining the size and lifetime of these planetary disks, which are the sites of planet formation.

    When a star forms, it is surrounded by a spinning disk of gas and dust...

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    Oxygen discovered in most distant known galaxy

    March 21, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Two different teams of astronomers have detected oxygen in the most distant known galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0. The discovery, reported in two separate studies, was made possible thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner. This record-breaking detection is making astronomers rethink how quickly galaxies formed in the early universe.

    Discovered last year, JADES-GS-z14-0 is the most distant confirmed galaxy ever found: it is so far away, its light took 13.4 billion years to reach us, meaning we see it as it was when the universe was less than 300 million years old, about 2% of its present age.

    The new oxygen detection with ALMA, a telescope array in Chile’s Atacama Desert, suggests the galaxy is much m...

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    Newly Discovered Group Hosts Two Optically Dark Star-Forming Galaxies

    January 22, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    New galaxy group detected by astronomers
    VISTA RGB color images of CGG-z4 at z ∼ 4.3 using the Ks (red), J (green), and i (blue) bands. Two spectroscopically confirmed galaxies have ALMA 3mm and 870µm continuum emission shown as green and yellow contours. Contours are shown at levels 5, 7, and 10σ. ALMA beam sizes and an image scale are shown in the lower right corner. The RGB frames are composed using linear scales with identical limits. Credit: Brinch et al., 2025.

    An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a new compact galaxy group using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The new group, designated CGG-z4, hosts two optically dark star-forming galaxies. The finding was detailed in a research paper published on the pre-print server arXiv.

    Galaxy groups are the smallest aggrega...

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