Interferometry of stunning spiral arms around young star reveals gravity’s hand in planet formation.

Traditionally, planet formation has been described as a “bottom-up” process, as dust grains gradually collect into bigger conglomerations over tens of millions of years, from microns to centimeters to meters to kilometers. Alternatively, another theory proposes that planets can form rapidly by a “top-down” process, where circumstellar disk material in spiral arms fragments due to gravitational instability.

Galaxies come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Some of the most significant differences among galaxies, however, relate to where and how they form new stars. Compelling research to explain these differences has been elusive, but that is about to change. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is conducting an unprecedented survey of nearby disk galaxies to study their stellar nurseries. With it, astronomers are beginning to unravel the complex and as-yet poorly understood relationship between star-forming clouds and their host galaxies.

Using the combined power of the Subaru Telescope and the ALMA radio telescope, astronomers have discovered a system where two distant galaxies, located 12.8 billion light-years away, are in the process of merging. These galaxies, hosting faint quasars at their centers, could be the ancestors of the brightest and most massive quasars in the early Universe, shedding light on the mysterious processes that trigger the explosive growth of supermassive black holes.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international team of astronomers found evidence that a white dwarf(the elderly remains of a star like the Sun) and a brown dwarf(a failed star without the mass to sustain nuclear fusion) collided in a short-lived blaze of glory that was witnessed on Earth in 1670 asNovasub Capite Cygni (a New Star below the Head of the Swan), which is now known as CK Vulpeculae.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration, was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

Astronomers have already cataloged nearly 4,000 exoplanets in orbit around distant stars. Though we have learned much about these newfound worlds, there is still much we do not know about the steps of planet formation and the precise cosmic recipes that spawn the wide array of planetary bodies we have already uncovered, including so-called hot Jupiters, massive rocky worlds, icy dwarf planets, and – hopefully someday soon – distant analogs of Earth.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), two teams of astronomers have for the first time discovered a planet-forming disk with misaligned rings around a triple star system, called GW Orionis. The astronomers give two possible scenarios for the misalignment: either the disk was torn apart by the gravitational pull from the stars, or by a newborn planet. 

An international team of astronomers used two of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world to create more than three hundred images of planet-forming disks around very young stars in the OrionClouds. These images reveal new details about the birthplaces of planets and the earliest stages of star formation.

How do supermassive black holes get so big? An international team of astronomers, including scientists at the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO) have discovered a powerful, rotating, magnetic wind that they believe is helping a galaxy’s central supermassive black hole to grow.

Most of the Universe is invisible to the human eye. The building blocks of stars are only revealed in wavelengths outside the visible spectrum. Astronomers recently used two very different and powerful telescopes to discover twin disks and twin parallel jets erupting from young stars in a multiple-star system. This discovery was unexpected and unprecedented, given the stars, disks, and jets' age, size, and chemical makeup. Their location in a known, well-studied part of the Universe adds to the thrill.