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 field and types of high-energy particles around the black hole. 

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 young star just 480 light-years away surrounded by a protoplanetary disk. 

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 disk, revealing the conditions just before planets begin to form.

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 has revealed this protocluster's dense 'metropolitan' core, indicating accelerated galaxy growth. Simulations suggest this region will merge into a singular, massive galaxy in the forthcoming tens of millions of years, offering insights into early galactic birth and evolution.

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 be well-underway in the more-evolved protoplanetary disks that have been studied in detail with ALMA, but until now there had been no systematic study to search for signs of planet formation in younger protostellar systems.

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 born simultaneously in a complex and crowded environment.