ALMA tagged posts

VLA teams up with Juno spacecraft to study Jupiter’s atmosphere, and ALMA reveals new details about Io’s volcanoes. While the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) frequently reveal important new facts about objects far beyond our own Milky Way Galaxy — at distances of many millions or billions of light-years — they also are vital tools for unraveling much closer mysteries, right here in our own Solar System...

Researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University have observed “baby stars” in the Small Magellanic Cloud, having an environment similar to the early universe. Toward one of the baby stars, they found molecular outflow, which has similar properties to those seen in the Milky Way galaxy, giving a new perspective on the birth of stars.

The heavy elements in interstellar matter significantly impact the mechanism of star formation. In the early universe, the abundance of heavy elements was lower than in the present universe because there was not enough time for nucleosynthesis to produce heavy elements in stars. It has not been well understood how star formation in such an environment differs from present-day star formation.

An international team led by Professor Toshikazu Onishi, Osaka...

While observing a newly-dormant galaxy using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), scientists discovered that it had stopped forming stars not because it had used up all of its gas but because most of its star-forming fuel had been thrown out of the system as it merged with another galaxy. The result is a first for ALMA scientists. What’s more, if proven common, the results could change the way scientists think about galaxy mergers and deaths. The results of the research are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

As galaxies move through the Universe, they sometimes encounter other galaxies. As they interact, each galaxy’s gravity pulls on the other...

Astronomers frequently observe carbon monoxide in planetary nurseries. The compound is ultrabright and extremely common in protoplanetary disks—regions of dust and gas where planets form around young stars—making it a prime target for scientists.

But for the last decade or so, something hasn’t been adding up when it comes to carbon monoxide observations, says Diana Powell, a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian. A huge chunk of carbon monoxide is missing in all observations of disks, if astronomers’ current predictions of its abundance are correct.

Now, a new model—validated by observations with ALMA—has solved the mystery: carbon monoxide has been hiding in ice format...