ALMA Astronomy News

The Event Horizon Telescope ( EHT ) collaboration, which produced the first-ever image of a black hole, has today revealed a new view of the massive object at the center of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy: how it looks in polarised light. With this data, astronomers measured polarization, a signature of magnetic fields, for the first time this close to the edge of a black hole. The observations are ke...

A team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has completed the first census of molecular clouds in the nearby Universe, revealing that contrary to previous scientific opinion, these stellar nurseries do not all look and act the same. In fact, they’re as diverse as the people, homes, neighborhoods, and regions that make up our own world.  

Astronomers observed with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) the center of a relatively nearby galaxy known as NGC 253, which produces stars at a very high rate. With more than 300 hours of observation, they detected more than one hundred molecular species, far more than previous studies outside the Milky Way have detected. The high sensitivity of ALMA successfully detected mo...

Using data for more than 500 young stars observed with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), scientists have uncovered a direct link between protoplanetary disk structures—the planet -forming disks that surround stars—and planet demographics. The survey proves that higher mass stars are more likely to be surrounded by disks with “gaps” in them and that these gaps directly correl...

A new image from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration has uncovered strong and organized magnetic fields spiraling from the edge of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). Seen in polarised light for the first time, this new view of the monster lurking at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy has revealed a magnetic field structure strikingly similar to that of the black hole a...

Researchers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to find water vapor in the disc around a young star, precisely where planets may be forming. Water is a key ingredient for life on Earth and is also thought to play a significant role in planet formation. Yet, until now, we had never been able to map how water is distributed in a stable, cool disc — the type of disc that...

An international collaboration of scientists using ALMA has completed the most extensive chemical composition mapping of the protoplanetary disks around five nearby young stars at high resolution, producing images that capture the molecular composition associated with planetary births, and a roadmap for future studies of the makeup of planet- and comet-forming regions. 

Using ALMA, astronomers have unambiguously detected the presence of a disc around a planet outside our Solar System for the first time. The observations will shed new light on how moons and planets form in young stellar systems.

A new study from scientists using ALMA suggests that previously displaced gases can re-accrete onto galaxies, potentially slowing down the process of galaxy death caused by ram pressure stripping, and creating unique structures more resistant to its effects.

A quasar is a compact region powered by a supermassive black hole located in the center of a massive galaxy. They are extremely luminous, with a point-like appearance similar to stars, and are extremely distant from Earth. Owing to their distance and brightness, they provide a peek into conditions of the early Universe, when it was less than 1 billion years old.

Early massive galaxies—those that formed in the three billion years following the Big Bang —should have contained large amounts of cold hydrogen gas, the fuel required to make stars . But scientists observing the early Universe with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Hubble Space Telescope have spotted something strange: half a dozen early massive galaxies that ran out...

While investigating the data of young, distant galaxies observed with ALMA, Yoshinobu Fudamoto from Waseda University and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan noticed unexpected emissions coming from seemingly empty regions in space that, a global research team confirmed, came actually from two hitherto undiscovered galaxies heavily obscured by cosmic dust. This discovery suggests that n...

With a remarkable observational campaign that involved 12 telescopes both on the ground and in space, including ALMA, astronomers have uncovered the strange behavior of a pulsar, a super-fast-spinning dead star. This mysterious object is known to switch between two brightness modes almost constantly, which has been an enigma until now. However, astronomers have found that sudden ejections of matte...

An international team of astronomers, spearheaded by Professor Yoichi Tamura of Nagoya University, has achieved an astronomical tour de force by capturing high-resolution images of a fledgling galaxy that existed a mere 600 million years after the Big Bang. These groundbreaking images, obtained with ALMA, have shed light on previously unseen structures formed through the interplay of dark and emis...

An international research team led by Tsuyoshi Tokuoka, a graduate student at Waseda University in Japan, has observed signs of rotation in a galaxy, which existed in the early universe, only 500 million years after the Big Bang. This galaxy is by far the earliest galaxy with a signature of galaxy rotation. Its rotational speed is only 50 kilometers per second, compared to 220 kilometers per secon...

Data from the world's largest radio telescopes holds clues An international team of astronomers has revealed mysterious star formation at the far edge of the galaxy M83. This research was presented today in a press conference at the 243rd American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.

An international team of astronomers has found ring and spiral structures in very young planetary disks, demonstrating that planet formation may begin much earlier than once thought. The results were presented today at the 243rd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration has published new results that describe for the first time how light from the edge of the supermassive black hole M87* spirals as it escapes the black hole’s intense gravity, a signature known as circular polarization. The way light’s electric field prefers to rotate clockwise or counterclockwise as it travels carries information about the magnetic f...

Highest Resolution Dust Polarization Image Ever Taken Toward a Protoplanetary Disk  One of the primary goals of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is to study the formation and evolution of planetary systems. Young stars are often surrounded by a disk of gas and dust, out of which planets can form. One of the first high resolution images that ALMA captured was of HL Tauri, a y...

Unraveling the cosmic ballet, researchers harness the power of ALMA to illuminate the intricate interplay between supermassive black holes and the birth and death of stars in NGC 1068

An international research team has harnessed the power of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to illuminate the beginnings of planet formation. Led by Project Assistant Professor Satoshi Ohashi from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), the team focused their study on a protostar named DG Taurus (DG Tau), which displayed a smooth and unblemished protoplanetary...

An international collaboration led by Assistant Professor Takuya Hashimoto (University of Tsukuba, Japan) and Researcher Javier Álvarez-Márquez (Spanish Center for Astrobiology) has used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to observe the most distant galaxy protocluster to date, 13.14 billion light-years away. This profound observation...

An international research team used ALMA to observe disks around 19 protostars with a very high resolution to search for the earliest signs of planet formation. This survey, called "Early Planet Formation in Embedded Disks (eDisk)" and led by Nagayoshi Ohashi at Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA, Taiwan), was motivated by the recent findings that planet formation may b...

Astronomers have found a way to directly measure the amount of gas in protoplanetary disks without making assumptions about the relative amounts of different types of gas, making this method more accurate and robust than previous methods.

Astronomers revealed fast gas outflows from a baby star strongly colliding with nearby dense gas where a group of baby stars are being born. The result suggests that the outflow collision shakes the cradle of the baby stars, and has a significant impact on the ongoing star formation process.  This study provides insight into the star formation process within cluster regions where baby stars are bo...