As a result of achieving high imaging dynamic range, a team of astronomers in Japan has discovered for the first time a faint radio emission covering a giant galaxy with an energetic black hole at its center. The radio emission is released from gas created directly by the central black hole. The team expects to understand how a black hole interacts with its host galaxy by applying the same technique to other quasars.

At simultaneous press conferences around the world, including at the ALMA observatory offices in Santiago, Chile, astronomers have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.

Scientists discover that post-starburst galaxies condense their gas rather than expelling it, begging the question: what’s keeping them from forming stars?

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, researchers at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands have for the first time detected dimethyl ether in a planet-forming disc. With nine atoms, this is the largest molecule identified in such a disc to date. It is also a precursor of larger organic molecules that can lead to the emergence of life.

An international astronomer team has discovered the most distant galaxy candidate to date, named HD1, which is about 13.5 billion light-years away. This discovery implies that bright systems like HD1 existed as early as 300 million years after the Big Bang. This galaxy candidate is one of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) targets launched late last year. If observations with the JWST confirm its exact distance, HD1 will be the most distant galaxy ever recorded.

Scientists studying V Hydrae (V Hya) have witnessed the star’s mysterious death throes in unprecedented detail. Using ALMA and data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the team discovered six slowly-expanding rings and two hourglass-shaped structures caused by the high-speed ejection of matter out into space. The results of the study are published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) made a rare detection of a likely stellar flyby event in the Z Canis Majoris (Z CMa) star system. An intruder—not bound to the system—object came in close proximity to and interacted with the environment surrounding the binary protostar, causing the formation of chaotic, stretched-out streams of dust and gas in the disk surrounding it.

Unlike our Sun, most stars live with a companion. Sometimes, two come so near that one engulfs the other - with far-reaching consequences. A team of astronomers that used ALMA to study 15 unusual stars was surprised to find that they all recently underwent this phase. The discovery promises new insight into the sky's most dramatic phenomena – and life, death, and rebirth among the stars.

For the first time, astronomers have detected a newborn star and the surrounding cocoon of complex organic molecules at the edge of our Galaxy, which is known as the extreme outer Galaxy. The discovery, which revealed the hidden chemical complexity of our Universe, appears in a paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

A new discovery is shedding light on how fluorine — an element found in our bones and teeth as fluoride — is forged in the Universe. Using ALMA, a team of astronomers have detected this element in a galaxy that is so far away its light has taken over 12 billion years to reach us. This is the first time fluorine has been spotted in such a distant star-forming galaxy.