ALMA Astronomy News

Two independent teams of astronomers have used Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to uncover convincing evidence that three young planets are in orbit around the infant star HD 163296. Using a novel planet-finding technique, the astronomers identified three disturbances in the gas-filled disc around the young star: the most reliable evidence yet that newly formed planets are in orbit there. These are considered the first planets discovered by ALMA.

Dust Accumulation to Form a New Planet Outside Just-Formed Planets

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has successfully observed a site of planet formation by detecting a high concentration of dust grains, a planet-forming material, outside the orbits of just-formed planets.

The ALMA and APEX telescopes have peered deep into space — back to the time when the Universe was one tenth of its current age — and witnessed the beginnings of gargantuan cosmic pileups: the impending collisions of young, starburst galaxies. Astronomers thought that these events occurred around three billion years after the Big Bang, so they were surprised when the new observations revealed them happening when the Universe was only half that age! These ancient systems of galaxies are thought to be building the most massive structures in the known Universe: galaxy clusters.

Astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to discover the tale-telling signs of planets in the young, likely planet-forming disk around the star MWC 758. They obtained an “ultra” high-resolution image revealing the disk having not only an off-centered cavity but also a spiral arm corresponding to one previously seen in reflected light.

New observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) suggest that planet formation can occur even in harsh stellar environments previously thought to be inhospitable.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) have discovered that both, starburst galaxies in the early Universe, and a star-forming region in a nearby galaxy, contain a much higher proportion of massive stars than is found in more peaceful galaxies. These findings challenge current ideas about how galaxies evolved, changing our understanding of cosmic star-formation history and the build-up of chemical elements.

Astronomers detected a faint but definite signal of oxygen in a galaxy located 13.28 billion light-years away from us, through observations using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Breaking their records, this marks the most distant oxygen ever detected in the Universe. Referencing infrared observations, the team determined that star formation in the galaxy started at an unexpectedly early stage: 250 million years after the Big Bang.

Astronomers expect that the first galaxies, those that formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, would share many similarities with some of the dwarf galaxies we see in the nearby Universe today. These early agglomerations of a few billion stars would then become the building blocks of the larger galaxies that came to dominate the Universe after the first few billion years.

Researchers have discovered the most distant Milky-Way-like galaxy yet observed. Dubbed REBELS-25, this disc galaxy seems as orderly as present-day galaxies, but we see it as it was when the Universe was only 700 million years old. 

For the first time, astronomers have captured images of a star other than the Sun in enough detail to track the motion of bubbling gas on its surface. The images of the star, R Doradus, were obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in July and August 2023. They show giant, hot bubbles of gas, 75 times the size of the Sun, appearing on the surface and sinking back into the star’s interior faster than expected.