From California Institute of Technology (US) : “Observatory in Chile Takes Highest-Resolution Measurements of Asteroid Surface Temperatures Ever Obtained from Earth”

From California Institute of Technology (US)

August 05, 2021

The study’s target, Psyche, is the destination of an upcoming NASA mission.

A close examination of the millimeter-wavelength emissions from the asteroid Psyche, which NASA intends to visit in 2026, has produced the first temperature map of the object, providing new insight into its surface properties. The findings, described in a paper published in Planetary Science Journal on August 5, are a step toward resolving the mystery of the origin of this unusual object, which has been thought by some to be a chunk of the core of an ill-fated protoplanet.

Psyche orbits the sun in the asteroid belt, a donut-shaped region of space between Earth and Jupiter that contains more than a million rocky bodies that range in size from 10 meters to 946 kilometers in diameter.

The inner Solar System, from the Sun to Jupiter. Also includes the asteroid belt (the white donut-shaped cloud), the Hildas (the orange “triangle” just inside the orbit of Jupiter), the Jupiter trojans (green), and the near-Earth asteroids. The group that leads Jupiter are called the “Greeks” and the trailing group are called the “Trojans” (Murray and Dermott, Solar System Dynamics, pg. 107)This image is based on data found in the en:JPL DE-405 ephemeris, and the en:Minor Planet Center database of asteroids (etc) published 2006 Jul 6. The image is looking down on the en:ecliptic plane as would have been seen on 2006 August 14. It was rendered by custom software written for Wikipedia. The same image without labels is also available at File:InnerSolarSystem.png. Mdf at English Wikipedia.

With a diameter of more than 200 km, Psyche is the largest of the M-Type asteroids, an enigmatic class of asteroids that are thought to be metal rich and therefore potentially may be fragments of the cores of proto-planets that broke up as the solar system formed.

“The early solar system was a violent place, as planetary bodies coalesced and then collided with one another while settling into orbits around the sun,” says Caltech’s Katherine de Kleer, assistant professor of planetary science and astronomy and lead author of the PSJ article. “We think that fragments of the cores, mantles, and crusts of these objects remain today in the form of asteroids. If that’s true, it gives us our only real opportunity to directly study the cores of planet-like objects.”

Studying such relatively tiny objects that are so far away from Earth (Psyche drifts at a distance that ranges between 179.5 and 329 million km from Earth) poses a significant challenge to planetary scientists, which is why NASA plans to send a probe to Psyche to examine it up close.

NASA Psyche spacecraft depiction.

Typically, thermal observations from Earth—which measure the light emitted by an object itself rather than light from the sun reflected off of that object—are in infrared wavelengths and can produce only 1-pixel images of asteroids. That one pixel does, however, reveal a lot of information; for example, it can be used to study the asteroid’s thermal inertia, or how fast it heats up in sunlight and cools down in darkness.

“Low thermal inertia is typically associated with layers of dust, while high thermal inertia may indicate rocks on the surface,” says Caltech’s Saverio Cambioni, postdoctoral scholar in planetary science and co-author of the PSJ article. “However, discerning one type of landscape from the other is difficult.” Data from viewing each surface location at many times of day provide much more detail, leading to an interpretation that is subject to less ambiguity, and which provide a more reliable prediction of landscape type prior to a spacecraft’s arrival.

De Kleer and Cambioni, together with co-author Michael Shepard of Bloomsburg University (US) in Pennsylvania, took advantage of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, which became fully operational in 2013, to obtain such data.

[Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte] (EU)/National Radio Astronomy Observatory(US)/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan(JP) ALMA Array in Chile in the Atacama at Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 metres.

The array of 66 radio telescopes enabled the team to map the thermal emissions from Psyche’s entire surface at a resolution of 30 km (where each pixel is 30 km by 30 km) and generate an image of the asteroid composed of about 50 pixels.

This was possible because ALMA observed Psyche at millimeter wavelengths, which are longer (ranging from 1 to 10 millimeters) than the infrared wavelengths (typically between 5 and 30 microns). The use of longer wavelengths allowed the researchers to combine the data collected from the 66 telescopes to create a much larger effective telescope; the larger a telescope, the higher the resolution of the images it produces.

The study confirmed that Psyche’s thermal inertia is high compared to that of a typical asteroid, indicating that Psyche has an unusually dense or conductive surface. When de Kleer, Cambioni, and Shepard analyzed the data, they also found that Psyche’s thermal emission—the amount of heat it radiates—is just 60 percent of what would be expected from a typical surface with that thermal inertia. Because surface emission is affected by the presence of metal on the surface, their finding indicates that Psyche’s surface is no less than 30 percent metal. An analysis of the polarization of the emission helped the researchers to roughly determine what form that metal takes. A smooth solid surface emits well-organized polarized light; the light emitted by Psyche, however, was scattered, suggesting that rocks on the surface are peppered with metallic grains.

“We’ve known for many years that objects in this class are not in fact solid metal but what they are and how they formed is still an enigma,” de Kleer says. The findings reinforce alternative proposals for Psyche’s surface composition, including that Psyche could be a primitive asteroid that formed closer to the sun than it is today instead of a core of a fragmented protoplanet.

The techniques described in this study provide a new perspective on asteroid surface compositions. The team is now expanding its scope to apply these techniques to other large objects in the asteroid belt.

The study was enabled by a related project by the team led by Michael Shepard at Bloomsburg University that utilized de Kleer’s data in combination with data from other telescopes, including Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, to pin down the size, shape, and orientation of Psyche. That in turn allowed the researchers to determine which pixels that had been captured actually represented the asteroid’s surface. Shepard’s team was scheduled to observe Psyche again at the end of 2020, but damage from cable failures shut the telescope down before the observations could be made.

See the full article here .

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Caltech campus

The California Institute of Technology (US) is a private research university in Pasadena, California. The university is known for its strength in science and engineering, and is one among a small group of institutes of technology in the United States which is primarily devoted to the instruction of pure and applied sciences.

Caltech was founded as a preparatory and vocational school by Amos G. Throop in 1891 and began attracting influential scientists such as George Ellery Hale, Arthur Amos Noyes, and Robert Andrews Millikan in the early 20th century. The vocational and preparatory schools were disbanded and spun off in 1910 and the college assumed its present name in 1920. In 1934, Caltech was elected to the Association of American Universities, and the antecedents of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (US)’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech continues to manage and operate, were established between 1936 and 1943 under Theodore von Kármán.

Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphasis on science and engineering. Its 124-acre (50 ha) primary campus is located approximately 11 mi (18 km) northeast of downtown Los Angeles. First-year students are required to live on campus, and 95% of undergraduates remain in the on-campus House System at Caltech. Although Caltech has a strong tradition of practical jokes and pranks, student life is governed by an honor code which allows faculty to assign take-home examinations. The Caltech Beavers compete in 13 intercollegiate sports in the NCAA Division III’s Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC).

As of October 2020, there are 76 Nobel laureates who have been affiliated with Caltech, including 40 alumni and faculty members (41 prizes, with chemist Linus Pauling being the only individual in history to win two unshared prizes). In addition, 4 Fields Medalists and 6 Turing Award winners have been affiliated with Caltech. There are 8 Crafoord Laureates and 56 non-emeritus faculty members (as well as many emeritus faculty members) who have been elected to one of the United States National Academies. Four Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force and 71 have won the United States National Medal of Science or Technology. Numerous faculty members are associated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute(US) as well as National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US). According to a 2015 Pomona College(US) study, Caltech ranked number one in the U.S. for the percentage of its graduates who go on to earn a PhD.

Research

Caltech is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity”. Caltech was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934 and remains a research university with “very high” research activity, primarily in STEM fields. The largest federal agencies contributing to research are National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US); National Science Foundation(US); Department of Health and Human Services(US); Department of Defense(US), and Department of Energy(US).

In 2005, Caltech had 739,000 square feet (68,700 m^2) dedicated to research: 330,000 square feet (30,700 m^2) to physical sciences, 163,000 square feet (15,100 m^2) to engineering, and 160,000 square feet (14,900 m^2) to biological sciences.

In addition to managing JPL, Caltech also operates the Caltech Palomar Observatory(US); the Owens Valley Radio Observatory(US);the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory(US); the W. M. Keck Observatory at the Mauna Kea Observatory(US); the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory at Livingston, Louisiana and Richland, Washington; and Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory(US) in Corona del Mar, California. The Institute launched the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech in 2006; the Keck Institute for Space Studies in 2008; and is also the current home for the Einstein Papers Project. The Spitzer Science Center(US), part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center(US) located on the Caltech campus, is the data analysis and community support center for NASA’s Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope [no longer in service].

Caltech partnered with University of California at Los Angeles(US) to establish a Joint Center for Translational Medicine (UCLA-Caltech JCTM), which conducts experimental research into clinical applications, including the diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as cancer.

Caltech operates several Total Carbon Column Observing Network(US) stations as part of an international collaborative effort of measuring greenhouse gases globally. One station is on campus.

From Yale University (US) : “Catching a cosmic boomerang in action”

From Yale University (US)

July 29, 2021
By Jim Shelton

Media Contact
Fred Mamoun
fred.mamoun@yale.edu
203-436-2643

Zoomed in view of an ALMA (red/orange) and Hubble Space Telescope (optical) composite of NGC4921. This composite highlights filament structures resulting from the effects of ram pressure stripping. Ram pressure stripping is a process known to strip gas out of galaxies, leaving them without the material needed to form new stars. A new study indicates that some material may not be stripped away from the galaxy, and is instead, reaccreted, potentially with the help of magnetic fields, slowing down the process of galaxy death. Credit: L. Shatz/ALMA Observatory(CL) (European Southern Observatory [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte] (EU)(CL) /National Astronomy Observatory of Japan (JP)/ S. Dagnello National Radio Astronomy Observatory (US))/, National Aeronautics Space Agency (US)/European Space Agency [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU)/Hubble/K. Cook (DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (US)).

For the first time, astronomers have observed a cosmic boomerang effect — streams of heavy, molecular gas that are stripped away from a distant galaxy only to circle back and return later.

Astronomers at Yale and Arizona State University (US) led the research team that made the discovery, which had been theorized in simulations but not observed in detail. Their findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The observation offers new insights into the life cycle of galaxies and the structural formations within galaxies, as traced by molecular gas. In particular, the research focuses on a process called ram pressure stripping, in which gas from galaxy clusters acts like a wind that strips away the star-making material inside a galaxy — hastening its demise.

“Astronomers are interested in studying how galaxies grow, live, and die,” said lead author William Cramer, who began the research as a Yale graduate student and is now a postdoctoral research scholar at Arizona State. “Effects like ram pressure that can speed up the normal galaxy lifecycle are very important to understand for this reason. Furthermore, the molecular gas in galaxies is the birthplace of new stars, and therefore studying the effect of ram pressure on it is of paramount importance.”

This side-by-side composite shows ALMA (red/orange) data laid over Hubble Space Telescope (optical) images of NGC4921. A new study of the spiral bar galaxy revealed filament structures similar to the Pillars of Creation but significantly larger. These structures are caused by a process known as ram pressure stripping, which pushes gas out of galaxies, leaving them without the material needed to form new stars. Credit: L. Shatz/ ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Dagnello (NRAO), NASA/ESA/Hubble/K. Cook (LLNL).

For the study, the researchers used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope, located in northern Chile, to create a high-resolution map of dense molecular gas in the galaxy NGC 4921 as it experiences ram pressure stripping.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US)/European Space Agency [Agence spatiale européenne] [Europäische Weltraumorganisation] (EU) Hubble Space Telescope

European Southern Observatory [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte] (EU)/National Radio Astronomy Observatory(US)/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan(JP) ALMA Array in Chile in the Atacama at Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 metres.

The map shows unusual structures that form in the ram pressure “wind” — long filaments of heavy gas connected to newly-forming stars. This dense, heavy gas is thought to be more resistant to ram pressure stripping, perhaps due to magnetic fields holding it more firmly in place.

“When an external force like ram pressure disturbs a galaxy, it offers an opportunity to learn about the internal forces that operate in galaxies,” said co-author Jeffrey Kenney, a professor of astronomy in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “The unusual filaments would not form without magnetic fields, so we also learn about the importance of magnetic fields in galaxies from this ram pressure interaction.”

The ALMA data clearly show filaments of molecular gas connected to galaxy NGC 4921 — the filaments are, indeed, resisting. But then the researchers saw something else: Some of the previously-stripped gas comes back.

“Instead of being thrown out never to return, some of this gas is moving like a boomerang, being ejected but then circling and falling back to its source,” Cramer said. If this gas is recaptured into the galaxy, it can form new stars.

The boomerang effect is significant for several reasons, according to the researchers. It provides hard evidence about the evolution of galaxies; it confirms a long-held theory about galaxy development; and it aids astronomers trying to predict the birthrate of new stars.

“The interstellar medium of galaxies is complex, with many variables that are hard to model,” Cramer said. “This observation is important because it shows that fallback of gas can be detected and allows us to search more broadly to help characterize it.”

See the full article here .

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About Yale University (US)

Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Research

Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) (US) and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation (US), Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences (US), 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering (US) and 49 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (US). The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

Notable alumni

Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.

At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton,

Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health (US) director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.

From European Southern Observatory (EU) (CL) : “Astronomers make first clear detection of a moon-forming disc around an exoplanet”

From European Southern Observatory (EU) (CL)

22 July 2021

Myriam Benisty
University of Chile [Universidad de Chile] (CL) and University of Grenoble Alpes [Université Grenoble Alpes] (FR)
Santiago de Chile, Chile
myriam.benisty@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

Jaehan Bae
Earth and Planets Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science (US)
Washington DC, USA
Email: jbae@carnegiescience.edu

Stefano Facchini
European Southern Observatory
Garching bei München, Germany
Email: stefano.facchini@eso.org

Miriam Keppler
MPG Institute for Astronomy [MPG Institut für Astronomie](DE)
Heidelberg, Germany
Email: keppler@mpia.de

Richard Teague
Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (US)
Cambridge, MA, USA
Email: richard.d.teague@cfa.harvard.edu

Bárbara Ferreira
ESO Media Manager
Garching bei München, Germany
Cell: +49 151 241 664 00
Email: press@eso.org

Wide and close-up views of a moon-forming disc as seen with ALMA.
Using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array (ALMA) [below], in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, 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.

“Our work presents a clear detection of a disc in which satellites could be forming,” says Myriam Benisty, a researcher at the University of Grenoble Alpes [Université Grenoble Alpes] (FR), and at the University of Chile [Universidad de Chile] (CL), who led the new research published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “Our ALMA observations were obtained at such exquisite resolution that we could clearly identify that the disc is associated with the planet and we are able to constrain its size for the first time,” she adds.

The disc in question, called a circumplanetary disc, surrounds the exoplanet PDS 70c, one of two giant, Jupiter-like planets orbiting a star nearly 400 light-years away. Astronomers had found hints of a “moon-forming” disc around this exoplanet before but, since they could not clearly tell the disc apart from its surrounding environment, they could not confirm its detection — until now.

In addition, with the help of ALMA, Benisty and her team found that the disc has about the same diameter as the distance from our Sun to the Earth and enough mass to form up to three satellites the size of the Moon.

But the results are not only key to finding out how moons arise. “These new observations are also extremely important to prove theories of planet formation that could not be tested until now,” says Jaehan Bae, a researcher from the Earth and Planets Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution for Science (US), and author on the study.

Planets form in dusty discs around young stars, carving out cavities as they gobble up material from this circumstellar disc to grow. In this process, a planet can acquire its own circumplanetary disc, which contributes to the growth of the planet by regulating the amount of material falling onto it. At the same time, the gas and dust in the circumplanetary disc can come together into progressively larger bodies through multiple collisions, ultimately leading to the birth of moons.

But astronomers do not yet fully understand the details of these processes. “In short, it is still unclear when, where, and how planets and moons form,” explains ESO Research Fellow Stefano Facchini, also involved in the research.

“More than 4000 exoplanets have been found until now, but all of them were detected in mature systems. PDS 70b and PDS 70c, which form a system reminiscent of the Jupiter-Saturn pair, are the only two exoplanets detected so far that are still in the process of being formed,” explains Miriam Keppler, researcher at the MPG Institute for Astronomy [MPG Institut für Astronomie](DE) and one of the co-authors of the study [1].

“This system therefore offers us a unique opportunity to observe and study the processes of planet and satellite formation,” Facchini adds.

PDS 70b and PDS 70c, the two planets making up the system, were first discovered using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) [below] in 2018 and 2019 respectively, and their unique nature means they have been observed with other telescopes and instruments many times since [2].

The latest high resolution ALMA observations have now allowed astronomers to gain further insights into the system. In addition to confirming the detection of the circumplanetary disc around PDS 70c and studying its size and mass, they found that PDS 70b does not show clear evidence of such a disc, indicating that it was starved of dust material from its birth environment by PDS 70c.

An even deeper understanding of the planetary system will be achieved with ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) [below], currently under construction on Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Atacama desert. “The ELT will be key for this research since, with its much higher resolution, we will be able to map the system in great detail,” says co-author Richard Teague, a researcher at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (US). In particular, by using the ELT’s Mid-infrared ELT Imager and Spectrograph (METIS), the team will be able to look at the gas motions surrounding PDS 70c to get a full 3D picture of the system.

Notes

[1] Despite the similarity with the Jupiter-Saturn pair, note that the disc around PDS 70c is about 500 times larger than Saturn’s rings.

[2] PDS 70b was discovered using the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument, while PDS 70c was found using the VLT’s Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE). The two-planet system has been investigated using the X-shooter instrument too, also installed on ESO’s VLT.

European Southern Observatory(EU) SPHERE extreme adaptive optics system and coronagraphic facility on the VLT UT3, Cerro Paranal, Chile, with an elevation of 2,635 metres (8,645 ft) above sea level.

European Southern Observatory(EU) MUSE on Yepun (UT4) on the Very Large Telescope, Cerro Paranal (CL)

ESO X-shooter on VLT on UT2 at Cerro Paranal, Chile.

More information

This research was presented in a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The team is composed of Myriam Benisty (Joint Franco-Chilean International Astronomy Unit [Unidad Mixta franco chilena de astronomía], National Centre for Scientific Research [Centre national de la recherche scientifique, [CNRS] (FR), Departamento de Astronomía, University of Chile [Universidad de Chile] (CL), Santiago de Chile, Chile and University of Grenoble Alpes [Université Grenoble Alpes] (FR), CNRS, Grenoble, France [UGA]), Jaehan Bae (Earth and Planets Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science (US), Washington DC, USA), Stefano Facchini (European Southern Observatory, Garching bei München, Germany), Miriam Keppler (MPG Institute for Astronomy [MPG Institut für Astronomie](DE), Heidelberg, Germany [MPIA]), Richard Teague (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Cambridge, MA, USA [CfA]), Andrea Isella (Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University (US), Houston, TX, USA), Nicolas T. Kurtovic (MPIA), Laura M. Perez (Departamento de Astronomía, Universidad de Chile, Santiago de Chile, Chile [UCHILE]), Anibal Sierra (UCHILE), Sean M. Andrews (CfA), John Carpenter (Joint ALMA Observatory, Santiago de Chile, Chile), Ian Czekala (Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pennsylvania State University (US), PA, USA, Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, Davey Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA, Center for Astrostatistics, Davey Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA and Institute for Computational & Data Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA), Carsten Dominik (Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam [Universiteit van Amsterdam] (NL), The Netherlands), Thomas Henning (MPIA), Francois Menard (UGA), Paola Pinilla (MPIA and Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London (UK), Holmbury St Mary, Dorking, UK) and Alice Zurlo (Núcleo de Astronomía, Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias, Diego Portales University [Universidad Diego Portales] (CL), Santiago de Chile, Chile and Escuela de Ingeniería Industrial, Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile, Chile).

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European Southern Observatory (EU)(CL) is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world’s most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world’s most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the world’s largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is a major partner in ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre EEuropean Extremely Large Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”.

European Southern Observatory(EU)La Silla Observatory 600 km north of Santiago de Chile at an altitude of 2400 metres.

ESO New Technology Telescope at Cerro La Silla , Chile, at an altitude of 2400 metres.

European Southern Observatory(EU) , Very Large Telescope at Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert •ANTU (UT1; The Sun ) •KUEYEN (UT2; The Moon ) •MELIPAL (UT3; The Southern Cross ), and •YEPUN (UT4; Venus – as evening star). Elevation 2,635 m (8,645 ft) from above Credit J.L. Dauvergne & G. Hüdepohl atacama photo.

Glistening against the awesome backdrop of the night sky aboveESO’s Paranal Observatory, four laser beams project out into the darkness from Unit Telescope 4 UT4 of the VLT, a major asset of the Adaptive Optics system.

European Southern Observatory [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte] (EU)/National Radio Astronomy Observatory(US)/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan(JP) ALMA Array in Chile in the Atacama at Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 metres.

European Southern Observatory(EU) ELT 39 meter telescope to be on top of Cerro Armazones in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. located at the summit of the mountain at an altitude of 3,060 metres (10,040 ft).

European Southern Observatory(EU) MPG Institute for Radio Astronomy [MPG Institut für Radioastronomie](DE) ESO’s Atacama Pathfinder Experiment(CL) high on the Chajnantor plateau in Chile’s Atacama region, at an altitude of over 4,800 m (15,700 ft).

A novel gamma ray telescope under construction on Mount Hopkins, Arizona. A large project known as the Čerenkov Telescope Array composed of hundreds of similar telescopes to be situated in the Canary Islands and Chile at ESO Cerro Paranal site. The telescope on Mount Hopkins will be fitted with a prototype high-speed camera, assembled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and capable of taking pictures at a billion frames per second. Credit: Vladimir Vassiliev.

From ALMA(CL): “EHT pinpoints dark heart of the nearest radio galaxy”

European Southern Observatory [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte] (EU)/National Radio Astronomy Observatory(US)/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan(JP) ALMA Array in Chile in the Atacama at Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 metres.

From ALMA(CL)

Valeria Foncea
Education and Public Outreach Officer
Joint ALMA Observatory Santiago – Chile
Phone: +56 2 2467 6258
Cell phone: +56 9 7587 1963
Email: valeria.foncea@alma.cl

Masaaki Hiramatsu
Education and Public Outreach Officer, NAOJ Chile
Observatory
, Tokyo – Japan
Phone: +81 422 34 3630
Email: hiramatsu.masaaki@nao.ac.jp

Bárbara Ferreira
ESO Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Phone: +49 89 3200 6670
Email: pio@eso.org

Amy C. Oliver
Public Information & News Manager
National Radio Astronomical Observatory (NRAO), USA
Phone: +1 434 242 9584
Email: aoliver@nrao.edu

All general references:
ALMA Observatory (CL)
European Southern Observatory(EU)
National Astronomical Observatory of Japan(JP)
National Radio Astronomy Observatory(US)

An international team anchored by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, which is known for capturing the first image of a black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, has now imaged the heart of the nearby radio galaxy Centaurus A in unprecedented detail. The astronomers pinpoint the location of the central supermassive black hole and reveal how a gigantic jet is being born. Most remarkably, only the outer edges of the jet seem to emit radiation, which challenges our theoretical models of jets. This work, led by Michael Janssen from the MPG Institute for Radio Astronomy [MPG Institut für Radioastronomie](DE) in Bonn and Radboud University Nijmegen [Radboud Universiteit](NL) is published in Nature Astronomy on July 19th.

At radio wavelengths Centaurus A emerges as one of the largest and brightest objects in the night sky. After it was identified as one of the first known extragalactic radio sources in 1949, Centaurus A has been studied extensively across the entire electromagnetic spectrum by a variety of radio, infrared, optical, X-ray, and gamma-ray observatories. At the center of Centaurus A lies a black hole with the mass of 55 million suns, which is right between the mass scales of the Messier 87 black hole (six and a half billion suns) and the one in the center of our own galaxy (about four million suns).

In a new paper in Nature Astronomy, data from the 2017 EHT observations have been analyzed to image Centaurus A in unprecedented detail. “This allows us for the first time to see and study an extragalactic radio jet on scales smaller than the distance light travels in one day. We see up close and personally how a monstrously gigantic jet launched by a supermassive black hole is being born”, says astronomer Michael Janssen.

Highest resolution image of Centaurus A obtained with the Event Horizon Telescope on top of a color composite image of the entire galaxy. Credit: Radboud University; European Southern Observatory [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte] (EU) (CL)/WFI; MPG Institute for Radio Astronomy [MPG Institut für Radioastronomie](DE) A. Weiss et al./ESO/APEX/; National Aeronautics Space Agency (US)/Chandra X-ray Center (US)/ R. Kraft et al.Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (US)/; M. Janssen et al. EHT.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration Chandra X-ray telescope(US)

Wide Field Imager on the 2.2 meter MPG/ESO telescope at Cerro LaSilla (CL)

MPG Institute for Astronomy [Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie](DE)European Southern Observatory(EU)2.2 meter telescope at Cerro La Silla, Chile, 600 km north of Santiago de Chile at an altitude of 2400 metres.

European Southern Observatory(EU) MPG Institute for Radio Astronomy [MPG Institut für Radioastronomie](DE) ESO’s Atacama Pathfinder Experiment(CL) high on the Chajnantor plateau in Chile’s Atacama region, at an altitude of over 4,800 m (15,700 ft).

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Event Horizon Telescope Array

Arizona Radio Observatory

University of Arizona Radio Observatory(US) at NOAO Kitt Peak National Observatory(US), AZ USA, U Arizona Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory(US) at altitude 2,096 m (6,877 ft).

ESO APEX
European Southern Observatory(EU) MPG Institute for Radio Astronomy [MPG Institut für Radioastronomie](DE) ESO’s Atacama Pathfinder Experiment(CL) high on the Chajnantor plateau in Chile’s Atacama region, at an altitude of over 4,800 m (15,700 ft).

CARMA
Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy(US)), in the Inyo Mountains to the east of the California Institute of Technology Owens Valley Radio Observatory(US), at a site called Cedar Flat, Altitude 1,222 m (4,009 ft), relocated to Owens Valley Radio Observatory, Altitude 1,222 m (4,009 ft).

NAOJ Atacama Submillimeter Telescope Experiment (ASTE)

NAOJ Atacama Submillimeter Telescope Experiment (ASTE) deployed to its site on Pampa La Bola, near Cerro Chajnantor and the Llano de Chajnantor, Observatory in northern Chile, Altitude 4,800 m (15,700 ft).

CfA Submillimeter Observatory

CFA Harvard Smithsonian Submillimeter Array on MaunaKea, Hawaii, USA, Altitude 4,205 m (13,796 ft).

Greenland Telescope

The Greenland Telescope is an international collaboration between: The Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics(project leaders); The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (US) The The National Radio Astronomy Observatory(US); and The Haystack Observatory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(US) at an altitude of 3,210 meters (10,530 feet).

(IRAM) 30m
Institute of Radio Astronomy [Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique](ES) 30m Radio telescope, on Pico Veleta in the Spanish Sierra Nevada, Altitude 2,850 m (9,350 ft).

IRAM NOEMA, France

IRAM-Institut de Radioastronomie Millimetrique (FR) NOEMA Interferometer in the French Alps on the wide and isolated Plateau de Bure at an elevation of 2550 meters, the telescope currently consists of ten antennas, each 15 meters in diameter interferometer Located in the French Alpes on the wide and isolated Plateau de Bure at an elevation of 2550 meters.

James Clerk Maxwell Telescope

East Asian Observatory James Clerk Maxwell Telescope MaunaKea Hawai’i(US)altitude 4207 m (13802 ft) above sea level.

Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano

The University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica MX Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano, Mexico, at an altitude of 4850 meters on top of the Sierra Negra.

ESO/NRAO/NAOJ ALMA Array.
European Southern Observatory/National Radio Astronomy Observatory(US)/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan(JP) ALMA Array in Chile in the Atacama at Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 metres.[/caption]

South Pole Telescope

South Pole Telescope SPTPOL. The SPT collaboration is made up of over a dozen (mostly North American) institutions, including The University of Chicago (US); The University of California Berkeley (US); Case Western Reserve University (US); Harvard/Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (US); The University of Colorado-Boulder (US); McGill University(CA); The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (US); The University of California-Davis (US); Ludwig Maximilians Universität München(DE); DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory (US); and The National Institute for Standards and Technology (US). It is funded by the National Science Foundation(US)

Future Array/Telescopes

California Institute of Technology Owens Valley Radio Observatory(US), located near Big Pine, California (US) in Owens Valley, Altitude1,222 m (4,009 ft).

Caltech Owens Valley Radio Observatory.
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Compared to all previous high-resolution observations, the jet launched in Centaurus A is imaged at a tenfold higher frequency and sixteen times sharper resolution. With the resolving power of the EHT, we can now link the vast scales of the source, which are as big as 16 times the angular diameter of the Moon on the sky, to their origin near the black hole in a region of merely the width of an apple on the Moon when projected on the sky. That is a magnification factor of one billion.

Understanding jets

Supermassive black holes residing in the center of galaxies like Centaurus A are feeding off gas and dust that is attracted by their enormous gravitational pull. This process releases massive amounts of energy and the galaxy is said to become ‘active’. Most matter lying close to the edge of the black hole falls in. However, some of the surrounding particles escape moments before capture and are blown far out into space: Jets – one of the most mysterious and energetic features of galaxies – are born.

Astronomers have relied on different models of how matter behaves near the black hole to better understand this process. But they still do not know exactly how jets are launched from its central region and how they can extend over scales that are larger than their host galaxies without dispersing out. The EHT aims to resolve this mystery.

The new image shows that the jet launched by Centaurus A is brighter at the edges compared to the center. This phenomenon is known from other jets, but has never been seen so pronouncedly before. “Now we are able to rule out theoretical jet models that are unable to reproduce this edge-brightening. It’s a striking feature that will help us better understand jets produced by black holes”, says Matthias Kadler, TANAMI leader and professor for astrophysics at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg [Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg] (DE) in Germany.

Future observations

With the new EHT observations of the Centaurus A jet, the likely location of the black hole has been identified at the launching point of the jet. Based on this location, the researchers predict that future observations at an even shorter wavelength and higher resolution would be able to photograph the central black hole of Centaurus A. This will require the use of space-based satellite observatories.

“These data are from the same observing campaign that delivered the famous image of the black hole in M87. The new results show that the EHT provides a treasure trove of data on the rich variety of black holes and there is still more to come”, says Heino Falcke, EHT board member and professor for Astrophysics at Radboud University.

Additional Information

To observe the Centaurus A galaxy with this unprecedentedly sharp resolution at a wavelength of 1.3 mm, the EHT collaboration used Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), the same technique with which the famous image of the black hole in M87 was made.

European Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network

An alliance of eight telescopes around the world, of which ALMA is the most sensitive element, joined together to create the virtual Earth-sized Event Horizon Telescope. The EHT collaboration involves more than 300 researchers from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America.

The EHT consortium consists of 13 stakeholder institutes: the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the University of Arizona (US), the University of Chicago (US), the East Asian Observatory, Goethe University [Goethe-Universität] Frankfurt(DE), Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique (MPG/CNRS/IGN), Large Millimeter Telescope, MPG Institute for Radio Astronomy [MPG Institut für Radioastronomie](DE), MIT Haystack Observatory (US), National Astronomical Observatory of Japan [国立天文台](JP), Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (CA), Radboud University Nijmegen [Radboud Universiteit](NL) and the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (US).

See the full article here .

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The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) (CL) , an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in Europe by the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO) (EU), in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) (CA) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and in East Asia by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan.

ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (US) (AUI) and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.

ALMA is a time machine!

ALMA-In Search of our Cosmic Origins

From European Southern Observatory [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte] (EU) and From ALMA [The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array] (CL) : “Galactic fireworks- new ESO images reveal stunning features of nearby galaxies”

From European Southern Observatory [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte] (EU)

and

European Southern Observatory/National Radio Astronomy Observatory(US)/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan(JP) ALMA Array in Chile in the Atacama at Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 metres.

From ALMA [The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array] (CL)

16 July 2021

Eric Emsellem
European Southern Observatory
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6914
Email: eric.emsellem@eso.org

Eva Schinnerer
MPG Institute for Astronomy [MPG Institut für Astronomie](DE)
Heidelberg, Germany
Tel: +49 6221 528 294
Email: schinner@mpia.de

Kathryn Kreckel
Centre for Astronomy of Heidelberg University [Astronomisches Rechen-Institut: Zentrum für Astronomie] (DE)
Heidelberg, Germany
Email: kathryn.kreckel@uni-heidelberg.de

Francesco Belfiore
INAF – Arcetri Observatory [Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory Florence] (IT), Italy
Email: francesco.belfiore@inaf.it

Bárbara Ferreira
ESO Media Manager
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6670
Cell: +49 151 241 664 00
Email: press@eso.org

A team of astronomers has released new observations of nearby galaxies that resemble colourful cosmic fireworks. The images, obtained with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) [below], show different components of the galaxies in distinct colours, allowing astronomers to pinpoint the locations of young stars and the gas they warm up around them. By combining these new observations with data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) [below], in which ESO is a partner, the team is helping shed new light on what triggers gas to form stars.

NGC 4303 as seen with MUSE on ESO’s VLT at several wavelengths of light.
This image, taken by the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows the nearby galaxy NGC 4303. NGC 4303 is a spiral galaxy, with a bar of stars and gas at its centre, located approximately 55 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The image is an overlay of observations conducted at different wavelengths of light to map stellar populations and warm gas. The golden glows mainly correspond to clouds of ionised hydrogen, oxygen and sulphur gas, marking the presence of newly born stars, while the bluish regions in the background reveal the distribution of slightly older stars.

The image was taken as part of the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) project, which is making high-resolution observations of nearby galaxies with telescopes operating across the electromagnetic spectrum. Credit: ESO/PHANGS.

European Southern Observatory(EU) MUSE on Yepun (UT4) on the Very Large Telescope, Cerro Paranal (CL)

NGC 4254 as seen with MUSE on ESO’s VLT at several wavelengths of light.
This image, taken with the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows the nearby galaxy NGC 4254. NGC 4254 is a grand-design spiral galaxy located approximately 45 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices. The image is a combination of observations conducted at different wavelengths of light to map stellar populations and warm gas. The golden glows mainly correspond to clouds of ionised hydrogen, oxygen and sulphur gas, marking the presence of newly born stars, while the bluish regions in the background reveal the distribution of slightly older stars.

The image was taken as part of the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) project, which is making high-resolution observations of nearby galaxies with telescopes operating across the electromagnetic spectrum. Credit: ESO/PHANGS.

See the full article for more individual images.

Astronomers know that stars are born in clouds of gas, but what sets off star formation, and how galaxies as a whole play into it, remains a mystery. To understand this process, a team of researchers has observed various nearby galaxies with powerful telescopes on the ground and in space, scanning the different galactic regions involved in stellar births.

“For the first time we are resolving individual units of star formation over a wide range of locations and environments in a sample that well represents the different types of galaxies,” says Eric Emsellem, an astronomer at ESO in Germany and lead of the VLT-based observations conducted as part of the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) project. “We can directly observe the gas that gives birth to stars, we see the young stars themselves, and we witness their evolution through various phases.”

Emsellem, who is also affiliated with the U Claude Lyon 1 [Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1] (FR), and his team have now released their latest set of galactic scans, taken with the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s VLT in the Atacama Desert in Chile. They used MUSE to trace newborn stars and the warm gas around them, which is illuminated and heated up by the stars and acts as a smoking gun of ongoing star formation.

The new MUSE images are now being combined with observations of the same galaxies taken with ALMA and released earlier this year. ALMA, which is also located in Chile, is especially well suited to mapping cold gas clouds — the parts of galaxies that provide the raw material out of which stars form.

By combining MUSE and ALMA images astronomers can examine the galactic regions where star formation is happening, compared to where it is expected to happen, so as to better understand what triggers, boosts or holds back the birth of new stars. The resulting images are stunning, offering a spectacularly colourful insight into stellar nurseries in our neighbouring galaxies.

“There are many mysteries we want to unravel,” says Kathryn Kreckel from the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg [Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg](DE) and PHANGS team member. “Are stars more often born in specific regions of their host galaxies — and, if so, why? And after stars are born how does their evolution influence the formation of new generations of stars?”

Astronomers will now be able to answer these questions thanks to the wealth of MUSE and ALMA data the PHANGS team have obtained. MUSE collects spectra — the “bar codes” astronomers scan to unveil the properties and nature of cosmic objects — at every single location within its field of view, thus providing much richer information than traditional instruments. For the PHANGS project, MUSE observed 30 000 nebulae of warm gas and collected about 15 million spectra of different galactic regions. The ALMA observations, on the other hand, allowed astronomers to map around 100 000 cold-gas regions across 90 nearby galaxies, producing an unprecedentedly sharp atlas of stellar nurseries in the close Universe.

In addition to ALMA and MUSE, the PHANGS project also features observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US)/European Space Agency [Agence spatiale européenne] [Europäische Weltraumorganisation] (EU) Hubble Space Telescope

The various observatories were selected to allow the team to scan our galactic neighbours at different wavelengths (visible, near-infrared and radio), with each wavelength range unveiling distinct parts of the observed galaxies. “Their combination allows us to probe the various stages of stellar birth — from the formation of the stellar nurseries to the onset of star formation itself and the final destruction of the nurseries by the newly born stars — in more detail than is possible with individual observations,” says PHANGS team member Francesco Belfiore from INAF-Arcetri in Florence, Italy. “PHANGS is the first time we have been able to assemble such a complete view, taking images sharp enough to see the individual clouds, stars, and nebulae that signify forming stars.”

The work carried out by the PHANGS project will be further honed by upcoming telescopes and instruments, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

National Aeronautics Space Agency(USA)/European Space Agency [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU)/ Canadian Space Agency [Agence Spatiale Canadienne](CA) Webb Infrared Space Telescope(US) James Webb Space Telescope annotated. Scheduled for launch in October 2021.

The data obtained in this way will lay further groundwork for observations with ESO’s future Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) [below], which will start operating later this decade and will enable an even more detailed look at the structures of stellar nurseries.

“As amazing as PHANGS is, the resolution of the maps that we produce is just sufficient to identify and separate individual star-forming clouds, but not good enough to see what’s happening inside them in detail,” pointed out Eva Schinnerer, a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and principal investigator of the PHANGS project, under which the new observations were conducted. “New observational efforts by our team and others are pushing the boundary in this direction, so we have decades of exciting discoveries ahead of us.”

More information

The international PHANGS team is composed of over 90 scientists ranging from Master students to retirees working at 30 institutions across four continents. The MUSE data reduction working group within PHANGS is being led by Eric Emsellem (European Southern Observatory, Garching, Germany and Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, Université de Lyon, ENS de Lyon, Saint-Genis Laval, France) and includes Francesco Belfiore (INAF Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Florence, Italy), Guillermo Blanc, Carnegie Observatories, Pasadena, US), Enrico Congiu (Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile and Las Campanas Observatory, Carnegie Institution for Science, Atacama Region, Chile), Brent Groves (The University of Western Australia (AU), Perth, Australia), I-Ting Ho (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany [MPIA]), Kathryn Kreckel (Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany), Rebecca McElroy (Sydney Institute for Astronomy (SIfA) (AU), Sydney, Australia), Ismael Pessa (MPIA), Patricia Sanchez-Blazquez (Complutense University of Madrid[Universidad Complutense Madrid] Institute of Particle and Cosmos Physics [Instituto de Física de Partículas y Cosmos] (ES), Madrid, Spain), Francesco Santoro (MPIA), Fabian Scheuermann (Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany) and Eva Schinnerer (MPIA).

Go to the ESO public image archive to see a sample of PHANGS images.

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

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Nicolás Lira
Education and Public Outreach Coordinator
Joint ALMA Observatory, Santiago – Chile
Phone: +56 2 2467 6519
Cell phone: +56 9 9445 7726
Email: nicolas.lira@alma.cl

Valeria Foncea
Education and Public Outreach Officer
Joint ALMA Observatory Santiago – Chile
Phone: +56 2 2467 6258
Cell phone: +56 9 7587 1963
Email: valeria.foncea@alma.cl

Masaaki Hiramatsu
Education and Public Outreach Officer, NAOJ Chile
Observatory
, Tokyo – Japan
Phone: +81 422 34 3630
Email: hiramatsu.masaaki@nao.ac.jp

Bárbara Ferreira
ESO Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Phone: +49 89 3200 6670
Email: pio@eso.org

Amy C. Oliver
Public Information & News Manager
National Radio Astronomical Observatory (NRAO), USA
Phone: +1 434 242 9584
Email: aoliver@nrao.edu

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) (CL), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in Europe by the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO), in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and in East Asia by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan.

ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.

ALMA is a time machine!

ALMA-In Search of our Cosmic Origins

European Southern Observatory [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte] (EU) is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world’s most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world’s most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the world’s largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is a major partner in ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre European Extremely Large Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”.

European Southern Observatory(EU) La Silla HELIOS (HARPS Experiment for Light Integrated Over the Sun)

ESO 3.6m telescope & HARPS atCerro LaSilla, Chile, 600 km north of Santiago de Chile at an altitude of 2400 metres.

MPG Institute for Astronomy [Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie](DE) 2.2 meter telescope at/European Southern Observatory(EU) Cerro La Silla, Chile, 600 km north of Santiago de Chile at an altitude of 2400 metres.

European Southern Observatory(EU)La Silla Observatory 600 km north of Santiago de Chile at an altitude of 2400 metres.

European Southern Observatory(EU) , Very Large Telescope at Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert •ANTU (UT1; The Sun ) •KUEYEN (UT2; The Moon ) •MELIPAL (UT3; The Southern Cross ), and •YEPUN (UT4; Venus – as evening star). Elevation 2,635 m (8,645 ft) from above Credit J.L. Dauvergne & G. Hüdepohl atacama photo. [/caption]

European Southern Observatory(EU) VLTI Interferometer image, Cerro Paranal, with an elevation of 2,635 metres (8,645 ft) above sea level, •ANTU (UT1; The Sun ),
•KUEYEN (UT2; The Moon ),
•MELIPAL (UT3; The Southern Cross ), and
•YEPUN (UT4; Venus – as evening star).

ESO Very Large Telescope 4 lasers on Yepun (CL)

Glistening against the awesome backdrop of the night sky above ESO’s Paranal Observatory, four laser beams project out into the darkness from Unit Telescope 4 UT4 of the VLT, a major asset of the Adaptive Optics system.

ESO/NTT NTT at Cerro La Silla , Chile, at an altitude of 2400 metres.

Part of ESO’s Paranal Observatory the VLT Survey Telescope (VISTA) observes the brilliantly clear skies above the Atacama Desert of Chile. It is the largest survey telescope in the world in visible light, with an elevation of 2,635 metres (8,645 ft) above sea level.

European Southern Observatory/National Radio Astronomy Observatory(US)/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan(JP) ALMA Array in Chile in the Atacama at Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 metres.

European Southern Observatory(EU) ELT 39 meter telescope to be on top of Cerro Armazones in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. located at the summit of the mountain at an altitude of 3,060 metres (10,040 ft).

European Southern Observatory(EU)/MPG Institute for Radio Astronomy [MPG Institut für Radioastronomie](DE) ESO’s Atacama Pathfinder Experiment(CL) high on the Chajnantor plateau in Chile’s Atacama region, at an altitude of over 4,800 m (15,700 ft).

Leiden MASCARA instrument cabinet at Cerro La Silla, located in the southern Atacama Desert 600 kilometres (370 mi) north of Santiago de Chile at an altitude of 2,400 metres (7,900 ft).

ESO Next Generation Transit Survey telescopes, an array of twelve robotic 20-centimetre telescopes at Cerro Paranal,(CL) 2,635 metres (8,645 ft) above sea level.

TAROT telescope at Cerro LaSilla, 2,635 metres (8,645 ft) above sea level.

European Southern Observatory(EU) ExTrA telescopes at erro LaSilla at an altitude of 2400 metres.

A novel gamma ray telescope under construction on Mount Hopkins, Arizona. A large project known as the Čerenkov Telescope Array composed of hundreds of similar telescopes to be situated in the Canary Islands and Chile at, ESO Cerro Paranal site The telescope on Mount Hopkins will be fitted with a prototype high-speed camera, assembled at the. University of Wisconsin–Madison and capable of taking pictures at a billion frames per second. Credit: Vladimir Vassiliev.

European Space Agency [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU), The new Test-Bed Telescope 2is housed inside the shiny white dome shown in this picture, at ESO’s LaSilla Facility in Chile. The telescope has now started operations and will assist its northern-hemisphere twin in protecting us from potentially hazardous, near-Earth objects.The domes of ESO’s 0.5 m and the Danish 0.5 m telescopes are visible in the background of this image.Part of the world-wide effort to scan and identify near-Earth objects, the European Space Agency’s Test-Bed Telescope 2 (TBT2), a technology demonstrator hosted at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, has now started operating. Working alongside its northern-hemisphere partner telescope, TBT2 will keep a close eye on the sky for asteroids that could pose a risk to Earth, testing hardware and software for a future telescope network.

European Space Agency [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU) The open dome of The black telescope structure of the‘s Test-Bed Telescope 2 peers out of its open dome in front of the rolling desert landscape. The telescope is located at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, which sits at a 2400 metre altitude in the Chilean Atacama desert.

From ALMA [The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array] (CL) : Women in STEM-Teresa Paneque Carreño; Laura Perez;Cassandra Hall; Benedetta Veronesi “ALMA Observes Deep into Chaotic Planetary Nursery”

European Southern Observatory/National Radio Astronomy Observatory(US)/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan(JP) ALMA Array in Chile in the Atacama at Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 metres.

From ALMA [The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array] (CL)

17 June, 2021

Nicolás Lira
Education and Public Outreach Coordinator
Joint ALMA Observatory, Santiago – Chile
Phone: +56 2 2467 6519
Cell phone: +56 9 9445 7726
Email: nicolas.lira@alma.cl

Masaaki Hiramatsu
Education and Public Outreach Officer, NAOJ Chile
Observatory
, Tokyo – Japan
Phone: +81 422 34 3630
Email: hiramatsu.masaaki@nao.ac.jp

Bárbara Ferreira
ESO Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Phone: +49 89 3200 6670
Email: pio@eso.org

Amy C. Oliver
Public Information & News Manager
National Radio Astronomical Observatory (NRAO), USA
Phone: +1 434 242 9584
Email: aoliver@nrao.edu

Planet formation is still a mystery. Astronomers have been studying protoplanetary discs for decades, trying to solve the details of planetary genesis. Thanks to ALMA, a team of scientists, for the first time, dug deep into the spiral structures of the massive protoplanetary disk of Elias 2-27, a young star 378 light-years away in the Ophiuchus constellation. The research team thinks that gravitational instabilities are the origin of the spirals rather than the interaction with a planet or accompanying star. The results of this study appeared in The Astrophysical Journal today.

Multiple molecular tracers helped scientists to better understand the gases present in the disk surrounding Elias 2-27. Visible in this composite are the 0.87mm dust continuum data (blue), C18O emission (yellow), and 13CO emission (red). Credit: Teresa Paneque-Carreño/ Bill Saxton, NRAO/Associated Universities Inc (US)/National Science Foundation (US).

Using gas velocity data, scientists observing Elias 2-27 were able to directly measure the mass of the young star’s protoplanetary disk and also trace dynamical perturbations in the star system. Visible in this animation are the dust continuum 0.87mm emission data (blue), along with emissions from gases C18O (yellow) and 13CO (red). Credit: Teresa Paneque-Carreño/ Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF.

Using gas velocity data, scientists observing Elias 2-27 were able to directly measure the mass of the young star’s protoplanetary disk and also trace dynamical perturbations in the star system. Visible in this paneled composite are the dust continuum 0.87mm emission data (blue), along with emissions from gases C18O (yellow) and 13CO (red). Credit: Teresa Paneque-Carreño/ Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF.

Elias 2-27 is a young star located just 378 light-years from Earth. The star is host to a massive protoplanetary disk of gas and dust, one of the key elements to planet formation. In this graphic illustration, dust is distributed along a spiral-shaped morphology first discovered in Elias 2-27 in 2016. The larger dust grains are found along the spiral arms while the smaller dust grains are distributed all around the protoplanetary disk. Asymmetric inflows of gas were also detected during the study, indicating that there may still be material infalling into the disk. Scientists believe that Elias 2-27 may eventually evolve into a planetary system, with gravitational instabilities causing the formation of giant planets. Because this process takes millions of years to occur, scientists can only observe the beginning stages. Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF.

Disks of gas and dust surround newly formed young stars. They are called protoplanetary disks, and astronomers expect planets to develop in them within the first 10 million years of the stars’ lives.

“How exactly planets form is one of the main questions in our field. However, there are some key mechanisms that we believe can drive the process,” explains Teresa Paneque Carreño, a former Astronomy student from University of Chile [Universidad de Chile] (CL) who is now doing her Ph.D. at European Southern Observatory [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte] (EU) (CL) in Garching and Principal Investigator of this study. “One of these mechanisms is gravitational instabilities, a process that occurs when the disk is massive enough that its gravity becomes relevant in the way particles interact between them.” Gravitational instabilities can cause the disk to fragment in small clumps, which could become giant planets very fast.

Elias 2-27’s unique characteristics have made it popular with ALMA scientists for more than half a decade. A team led by Laura Perez from Universidad de Chile and co-author of this new investigation discovered, also using ALMA, the spirals in Elias 2-27’s disk back in 2016 [Science]. But they were unable to determine what generated the gravitational instabilities. Further observations in multiple ALMA bands and gas tracers were needed to explore the structure of the spirals in both gas and dust.

“We discovered in 2016 that the Elias 2-27 disk had a different structure from other already studied systems. Something not observed in a protoplanetary disk before: two large-scale spiral arms. The origin of these structures remained a mystery, and therefore we needed further observations,” explains Perez. “And so, together with collaborators, we put a proposal in ALMA to simultaneously explore both the gas and dust emission from this system. This new study became the focus of Teresa’s MSc thesis at Universidad de Chile”.

Cassandra Hall, Assistant Professor of Computational Astrophysics at the University of Georgia (US) and a co-author on the research, added that the confirmation of both vertical asymmetry and velocity perturbations—the first large-scale perturbations linked to spiral structure in a protoplanetary disk—could have significant implications for planet formation theory. “This could be a ‘smoking gun’ of gravitational instability, which may accelerate some of the earliest stages of planet formation. We first predicted this signature in 2020 [The Astrophysical Journal], and from a computational astrophysics point of view, it’s exciting to be right.”

Paneque-Carreño added that while the new research has confirmed some theories, it has also raised further questions. “While gravitational instabilities can now be confirmed to explain the spiral structures in the dust continuum surrounding the star, there is also an inner gap, or missing material in the disk, for which we do not have a clear explanation.”

“The high-angular resolution images obtained with ALMA at multiple wavelengths was key to studying the disk morphology and dust properties,” explains John Carpenter, ALMA Observatory Scientist and co-author of this research. “The spatial location of the different sized particles allows us to understand the dust growth processes and infer the origin of the spiral morphology.”

Additionally, ALMA’s high sensitivity allowed the team to study the kinematic perturbations and the dynamical processes traced by molecular emission. Using two molecules as tracers (13CO and C18O), they found that the disk was highly perturbed and surrounded by large-scale gas emissions produced by material beyond the extent of the main dust and gas disk.

“We were surprised to find vertical perturbations in the gas of the disk. This has not been observed in this kind of source before,” says Paneque Carreño. “The perturbations are too large to be explained by a companion. The asymmetric vertical structure of the disk is probably related to ongoing infall of material, showing how chaotic planet formation sites are.”

One of the barriers to understanding planet formation was the lack of direct mass measurement of planet-forming disks, a problem addressed in the new research. The high sensitivity of ALMA allowed the team to more closely study the dynamical processes, density, and even the mass of the disk. “Previous mass measurements of protoplanetary disks were indirect, based only on dust or rare isotopologues. With this new study, we are now sensitive to the entire mass of the disk,” said Benedetta Veronesi—a graduate student at the University of Milan [Università degli Studi di Milano Statale] (IT) and postdoctoral researcher at Lyon Higher Normal School [École normale supérieure de Lyon] (FR), and lead author on a second paper. “This finding lays the foundation for the development of a method to measure disk mass that will allow us to break down one of the biggest and most pressing barriers in the field of planet formation. Knowing the amount of mass present in planet-forming disks allows us to determine the amount of material available for the formation of planetary systems and to understand better the process by which they form.”

Although the team has answered many critical questions about the role of gravitational instability and disk mass in planet formation, the work is not done yet. “Studying how planets form is difficult because it takes millions of years to form planets. This is a very short time-scale for stars, which live thousands of millions of years, but a very long process for us,” said Paneque-Carreño. “What we can do is observe young stars, with disks of gas and dust around them, and try to explain why these disks of material look the way they do. It’s like looking at a crime scene and trying to guess what happened. Our observational analysis paired with future in-depth analysis of Elias 2-27 will allow us to characterize exactly how gravitational instabilities act in planet-forming disks and gain more insight into how planets are formed.”

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) (CL) , an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in Europe by the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO), in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and in East Asia by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan.

ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.

ALMA is a time machine!

ALMA-In Search of our Cosmic Origins

From ALMA [The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array] (CL) : “ALMA Discovers Earliest Gigantic Black Hole Storm”

European Southern Observatory/National Radio Astronomy Observatory(US)/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan(JP) ALMA Array in Chile in the Atacama at Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 metres.

From ALMA [The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array] (CL)

Nicolás Lira
Education and Public Outreach Coordinator
Joint ALMA Observatory, Santiago – Chile
Phone: +56 2 2467 6519
Cell phone: +56 9 9445 7726
Email: nicolas.lira@alma.cl

Masaaki Hiramatsu
Education and Public Outreach Officer, NAOJ Chile
Observatory
, Tokyo – Japan
Phone: +81 422 34 3630
Email: hiramatsu.masaaki@nao.ac.jp

Bárbara Ferreira
ESO Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Phone: +49 89 3200 6670
Email: pio@eso.org

Amy C. Oliver
Public Information & News Manager
National Radio Astronomical Observatory (NRAO), USA
Phone: +1 434 242 9584
Email: aoliver@nrao.edu

11 June, 2021

Researchers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) discovered a titanic galactic wind driven by a supermassive black hole 13.1 billion years ago. This is the earliest-yet-observed example of such wind to date and is a telltale sign that huge black holes have a profound effect on the growth of galaxies from the very early history of the Universe.

Artist’s impression of a galactic wind driven by a supermassive black hole located in the center of a galaxy. The intense energy emanating from the black hole creates a galaxy-scale flow of gas that blows away the interstellar matter that is the material for forming stars. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

ALMA image of the distant galaxy J1243+0100 hosting a supermassive black hole in its center. The distribution of the quiet gas in the galaxy is shown in yellow, and the distribution of high-speed galactic wind is shown in blue. The wind is located in the galaxy center, which indicates the supermassive black hole drives the wind. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Izumi et al.

At the center of many large galaxies hides a supermassive black hole that is millions to billions of times more massive than the Sun. Interestingly, the mass of the black hole is roughly proportional to the mass of the central region (bulge) of the galaxy in the nearby Universe. At first glance, this may seem obvious, but it is actually very strange. The reason is that the sizes of galaxies and black holes differ by about ten orders of magnitude. Based on this proportional relationship between the masses of two objects that are so different in size, astronomers believe that galaxies and black holes grew and evolved together (coevolution) through some kind of physical interaction.

A galactic wind can provide this kind of physical interaction between black holes and galaxies. A supermassive black hole swallows a large amount of matter. As that matter begins to move at high speed due to the black hole’s gravity, it emits intense energy, which can push the surrounding matter outward. This is how the galactic wind is created.

“The question is when did galactic winds come into existence in the Universe?” says Takuma Izumi, the lead author of the research paper and a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). “This is an important question because it is related to an important problem in astronomy: How did galaxies and supermassive black holes coevolve?”

The research team first used NAOJ’s Subaru Telescope to search for supermassive black holes.

NAOJ/Subaru Telescope at Mauna Kea Hawaii, USA,4,207 m (13,802 ft) above sea level

Thanks to its wide-field observation capability, they found more than 100 galaxies with supermassive black holes in the Universe more than 13 billion years ago [1].

Then, the research team utilized ALMA’s high sensitivity to investigate the gas motion in the host galaxies of the black holes. ALMA observed a galaxy HSC J124353.93+010038.5 (hereafter J1243+0100), discovered by the Subaru Telescope, and captured radio waves emitted by the dust and carbon ions in the galaxy [2].

Detailed analysis of the ALMA data revealed that there is a high-speed gas flow moving at 500 km per second in J1243+0100. This gas flow has enough energy to push away the stellar material in the galaxy and stop the star formation activity. The gas flow found in this study is truly a galactic wind, and it is the oldest observed example of a galaxy with a huge wind of galactic size. The previous record-holder was a galaxy about 13 billion years ago, so this observation pushes the start back another 100 million years.

The team also measured the motion of the quiet gas in J1243+0100 and estimated the mass of the galaxy’s bulge, based on its gravitational balance, to be about 30 billion times that of the Sun. The mass of the galaxy’s supermassive black hole, estimated by another method, was about 1% of that. The mass ratio of the bulge to the supermassive black hole in this galaxy is almost identical to the mass ratio of black holes to galaxies in the modern Universe. This implies that the coevolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies has been occurring since less than a billion years after the birth of the Universe.

“Our observations support recent high-precision computer simulations which have predicted that coevolutionary relationships were in place even at about 13 billion years ago,” comments Izumi. “We are planning to observe a large number of such objects in the future and hope to clarify whether or not the primordial coevolution seen in this object is an accurate picture of the general Universe at that time.”
Notes

[1] For more information, please see the Subaru Telescope press release issued on March 13, 2019, Astronomers Discover 83 Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe. The number of galaxies with supermassive black holes discovered was 83 at the time of this announcement, but the number of discoveries has now increased to over 100.

[2] The redshift of this object is z=7.07. Using the cosmological parameters measured with Planck (H0=67.3km/s/Mpc, Ωm=0.315, Λ=0.685: Planck 2013 Results), we can calculate the distance to the object to be 13.1 billion light-years. (Please refer to Expressing the distance to remote objects for the details.)

These observation results are presented as Takuma Izumi et al. Subaru High-z Exploration of Low-Luminosity Quasars (SHELLQs). XIII. Large-scale Feedback and Star Formation in a Low-Luminosity Quasar at z = 7.07, in The Astrophysical Journal on June 14, 2021.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) (CL) , an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in Europe by the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO), in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and in East Asia by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan.

ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.

ALMA is a time machine!

ALMA-In Search of our Cosmic Origins

From ALMA [The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array] (CL) : Women in STEM-Eva Schinnerer; Annie Hughes “Cosmic cartographers map nearby Universe revealing the diversity of star-forming galaxies”

European Southern Observatory/National Radio Astronomy Observatory(US)/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan(JP) ALMA Array in Chile in the Atacama at Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 metres.

From ALMA [The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array] (CL)

Nicolás Lira
Education and Public Outreach Coordinator
Joint ALMA Observatory, Santiago – Chile
Phone: +56 2 2467 6519
Cell phone: +56 9 9445 7726
Email: nicolas.lira@alma.cl

Masaaki Hiramatsu
Education and Public Outreach Officer, NAOJ Chile
Observatory
, Tokyo – Japan
Phone: +81 422 34 3630
Email: hiramatsu.masaaki@nao.ac.jp

Bárbara Ferreira
ESO Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Phone: +49 89 3200 6670
Email: pio@eso.org

Amy C. Oliver
Public Information & News Manager
National Radio Astronomical Observatory (NRAO), USA
Phone: +1 434 242 9584
Email: aoliver@nrao.edu

9 June, 2021

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), scientists completed a census of nearly 100 galaxies in the nearby Universe, showcasing their behaviors and appearances. The scientists compared ALMA data to that of the Hubble Space Telescope, shown in composite here. The survey concluded that contrary to popular scientific opinion, stellar nurseries do not all look and act the same. In fact, as shown here, they are as different as the neighborhoods, cities, regions, and countries that make up our own world. Credit: S. Dagnello (National Radio Astronomy Observatory (US)), ALMA (ESO [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte] (EU) (CL)/National Astronomy Observatory of Japan (JP)/PHANGS.

Shown here as an ALMA (orange/red) composite with NASA/ESA Hubble (US) data, NGC4254 was among the nearly 100 galaxies included in the recent PHANGS project census of galaxies in the nearby Universe. The survey found that stellar nurseries within these galaxies vary widely in appearance and behavior, and that these characteristics heavily depend on where the stellar nurseries are located. NGC4254 is an example of a galaxy featuring M type morphology. Credit: S. Dagnello (NRAO) ALMA (ESO/NAOJ)/PHANGS.

NGC4535 is a galaxy in the nearby Universe featuring grand-design spiral plus stellar bar morphology. It was catalogued along with nearly 100 other galaxies during a recent census by the PHANGS project. The census revealed that contrary to commonly accepted scientific theory, not all stellar nurseries look or act the same way. In fact, they’re quite diverse. NGC4535 is shown here as an ALMA (orange/red) composite with Hubble Space Telescope (HST) data. Credit: S. Dagnello (NRAO) ALMA (ESO/NAOJ)/PHANGS.

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.

Stars are formed out of clouds of dust and gas called molecular clouds, or stellar nurseries. Each stellar nursery in the Universe can form thousands or even tens of thousands of new stars during its lifetime. Between 2013 and 2019, astronomers on the PHANGS— Physics at High Angular Resolution in Nearby GalaxieS— project conducted the first systematic survey of 100,000 stellar nurseries across 90 galaxies in the nearby Universe to get a better understanding of how they connect back to their parent galaxies.

“We used to think that all stellar nurseries across every galaxy must look more or less the same, but this survey has revealed that this is not the case, and stellar nurseries change from place to place,” said Adam Leroy, Associate Professor of Astronomy at Ohio State University (US), and lead author of the paper presenting the PHANGS ALMA survey [Astrophysical Journal Supplement series]. “This is the first time that we have ever taken millimeter-wave images of many nearby galaxies that have the same sharpness and quality as optical pictures. And while optical pictures show us light from stars, these ground-breaking new images show us the molecular clouds that form those stars.”

The scientists compared these changes to the way that people, houses, neighborhoods, and cities exhibit like-characteristics but change from region to region and country to country.

“To understand how stars form, we need to link the birth of a single star back to its place in the Universe. It’s like linking a person to their home, neighborhood, city, and region. If a galaxy represents a city, then the neighborhood is the spiral arm, the house the star-forming unit, and nearby galaxies are neighboring cities in the region,” said Eva Schinnerer, an astronomer at the MPG Institute for Astronomy [MPG Institut für Astronomie](DE) and principal investigator for the PHANGS collaboration “These observations have taught us that the “neighborhood” has small but pronounced effects on where and how many stars are born.”

To better understand star formation in different types of galaxies, the team observed similarities and differences in the molecular gas properties and star formation processes of galaxy disks, stellar bars, spiral arms, and galaxy centers. They confirmed that the location, or neighborhood, plays a critical role in star formation.

“By mapping different types of galaxies and the diverse range of environments that exist within galaxies, we are tracing the whole range of conditions under which star-forming clouds of gas live in the present-day Universe. This allows us to measure the impact that many different variables have on the way star formation happens,” said Guillermo Blanc, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science (US), and a co-author on the paper.

“How stars form, and how their galaxy affects that process, are fundamental aspects of astrophysics,” said Joseph Pesce, National Science Foundation’s (US) program officer for NRAO/ALMA. “The PHANGS project utilizes the exquisite observational power of the ALMA observatory and has provided remarkable insight into the story of star formation in a new and different way.”

Annie Hughes, an astronomer at Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology [Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie ] (FR), added that this is the first time scientists have a snapshot of what star-forming clouds are really like across such a broad range of different galaxies. “We found that the properties of star-forming clouds depend on where they are located: clouds in the dense central regions of galaxies tend to be more massive, denser, and more turbulent than clouds that reside in the quiet outskirts of a galaxy. The lifecycle of clouds also depends on their environment. How fast a cloud forms stars and the process that ultimately destroys the cloud both seem to depend on where the cloud lives.”

This is not the first time that stellar nurseries have been observed in other galaxies using ALMA, but nearly all previous studies focused on individual galaxies or part of one. Over a five-year period, PHANGS assembled a full view of the nearby population of galaxies. “The PHANGS project is a new form of cosmic cartography that allows us to see the diversity of galaxies in a new light, literally. We are finally seeing the diversity of star-forming gas across many galaxies and are able to understand how they are changing over time. It was impossible to make these detailed maps before ALMA,” said Erik Rosolowsky, Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Alberta (CA), and a co-author on the research. “This new atlas contains 90 of the best maps ever made that reveal where the next generation of stars is going to form.”

For the team, the new atlas doesn’t mean the end of the road. While the survey has answered questions about what and where, it has raised others. “This is the first time we have gotten a clear view of the population of stellar nurseries across the whole nearby Universe. In that sense, it’s a big step towards understanding where we come from,” said Leroy. “While we now know that stellar nurseries vary from place to place, we still do not know why or how these variations affect the stars and planets formed. These are questions that we hope to answer in the near future.”

Ten papers detailing the outcomes of the PHANGS survey are presented this week at the 238th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (US).

AAS Press Conference

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) (CL) , an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in Europe by the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO), in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and in East Asia by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan.

ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.

ALMA is a time machine!

ALMA-In Search of our Cosmic Origins

From ALMA [The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array] (CL) : “ALMA Spots Most Distant Dusty Galaxy Hidden in Plain Sight”

European Southern Observatory/National Radio Astronomy Observatory(US)/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan(JP) ALMA Array in Chile in the Atacama at Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 metres.

From ALMA [The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array] (CL)

11 December, 2019 [Just found this.]

Nicolás Lira
Education and Public Outreach Coordinator
Joint ALMA Observatory, Santiago – Chile
Phone: +56 2 2467 6519
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Email: nicolas.lira@alma.cl

Masaaki Hiramatsu
Education and Public Outreach Officer, NAOJ Chile
Observatory
, Tokyo – Japan
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Email: hiramatsu.masaaki@nao.ac.jp

Bárbara Ferreira
ESO Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
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Email: pio@eso.org

Iris Nijman
News and Public Information Manager
National Radio Astronomy Observatory Charlottesville, Virginia – USA
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ALMA radio image of the dusty star-forming galaxy called MAMBO-9. The galaxy consists of two parts, and it is in the process of merging. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), C.M. Casey et al.; NRAO/AUI/NSF, B. Saxton.

Artist impression of what MAMBO-9 would look like in visible light. The galaxy is very dusty and it has yet to build most of its stars. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, B. Saxton.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have spotted the light of a massive galaxy seen only 970 million years after the Big Bang. This galaxy, called MAMBO-9, is the most distant dusty star-forming galaxy that has ever been observed without the help of a gravitational lens.

Dusty star-forming galaxies are the most intense stellar nurseries in the universe. They form stars at a rate up to a few thousand times the mass of the Sun per year (the star-forming rate of our Milky Way is just three solar masses per year) and they contain massive amounts of gas and dust. Such monster galaxies are not expected to have formed early in the history of the universe, but astronomers have already discovered several of them as seen when the cosmos was less than a billion years old. One of them is galaxy SPT0311-58, which ALMA observed in 2018.

Because of their extreme behavior, astronomers think that these dusty galaxies play an important role in the evolution of the universe. But finding them is easier said than done. “These galaxies tend to hide in plain sight,” said Caitlin Casey of the University of Texas at Austin (US) and lead author of a study published in The Astrophysical Journal. “We know they are out there, but they are not easy to find because their starlight is hidden in clouds of dust.”

MAMBO-9’s light was already detected ten years ago by co-author Manuel Aravena, using the Max-Planck Millimeter BOlometer (MAMBO) instrument on the IRAM 30-meter telescope in Spain and the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in France.

IRAM-Institut de Radio Astronomie Millimétrique Plateau de Bure interferometer (FR) at an elevation of 2550 meters, the telescope currently consists of ten antennas, each 15 meters in diameter.interferometer, Located in the French Alpes on the wide and isolated Plateau de Bure at an elevation of 2550 meters.

IRAM 30m Radio telescope in Spain

But these observations were not sensitive enough to reveal the distance of the galaxy. “We were in doubt if it was real, because we couldn’t find it with other telescopes. But if it was real, it had to be very far away,” says Aravena, who was at that time a PhD student in Germany and is currently working for the Diego Portales University [Universidad Diego Portales] (CL) in Chile.

Thanks to ALMA’s sensitivity, Casey and her team have now been able to determine the distance of MAMBO-9. “We found the galaxy in a new ALMA survey specifically designed to identify dusty star-forming galaxies in the early universe,” said Casey. “And what is special about this observation, is that this is the most distant dusty galaxy we have ever seen in an unobstructed way.”

The light of distant galaxies is often obstructed by other galaxies closer to us. These galaxies in front work as a gravitational lens: they bend the light from the more distant galaxy. This lensing effect makes it easier for telescopes to spot distant objects (this is how ALMA could see galaxy SPT0311-58). But it also distorts the image of the object, making it harder to make out the details.

In this study, the astronomers saw MAMBO-9 directly, without a lens, and this allowed them to measure its mass. “The total mass of gas and dust in the galaxy is enormous: ten times more than all the stars in the Milky Way. This means that it has yet to build most of its stars,” Casey explained. The galaxy consists of two parts, and it is in the process of merging.

Casey hopes to find more distant dusty galaxies in the ALMA survey, which will give insight into how common they are, how these massive galaxies formed so early in the universe, and why they are so dusty. “Dust is normally a by-product of dying stars,” she said. “We expect one hundred times more stars than dust. But MAMBO-9 has not produced that many stars yet and we want to find out how dust can form so fast after the Big Bang.”

“Observations with new and more capable technology can produce unexpected findings like MAMBO-9,” said Joe Pesce, National Science Foundation Program Officer for NRAO and ALMA. “While it is challenging to explain such a massive galaxy so early in the history of the universe, discoveries like this allow astronomers to develop an improved understanding of, and ask ever more questions about, the universe.”

The light from MAMBO-9 travelled about 13 billion years to reach ALMA’s antennas (the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old today). That means that we can see what the galaxy looked like in the past (Watch this video to learn how ALMA works as a time-machine). Today, the galaxy would probably be even bigger, containing one hundred times more stars than the Milky Way, residing in a massive galaxy cluster.

Additional Information:

Science paper:
The Astrophysical Journal

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) (CL) , an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in Europe by the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO), in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and in East Asia by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan.

ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.

ALMA is a time machine!

ALMA-In Search of our Cosmic Origins

From Netherlands Research School for Astronomy [Nederlandse Onderzoekschool Voor Astronomie] (NL) via phys.org : “First discovery of methanol in a warm planet-forming disk”

From Netherlands Research School for Astronomy [Nederlandse Onderzoekschool Voor Astronomie] (NL)

via

phys.org

A map of the methanol (white) in the planetary disk around the star HD 100546. The red line is the orbit that the ‘cold’ planet Neptune would have if it were orbiting this star. So the white methanol is almost entirely in the ‘warm’ part of the planet forming disk. Credit: ALMA/Booth et al.

An international team of researchers led by Alice Booth (Leiden University [Universiteit Leiden] (NL)) have discovered methanol-ijs in the warm part of a planet-forming disk. The methanol cannot have been produced there and must have originated in the cold gas clouds from which the star and the disk formed. Thus, the methanol is inherited. If that is common, it could give the development of life a flying start. The researchers will publish their findings on Monday evening in Nature Astronomy.

Methanol, CH3OH, is one of the simplest complex molecules. It is considered by astronomers to be a precursor for the pre-biotic chemistry essential for life because it can be used to form, for example, amino acids and proteins. Researchers had already shown that methanol is present in one cold planet-forming disk around a nearby star, in comets and in the cold gas clouds from which stars form. Now, for the first time, a large reservoir of methanol has been discovered in a warm planet-forming disk.

This reservoir of methanol cannot have formed in the warm disk itself, as this is chemically impossible. The researchers therefore propose that the methanol ice was already present on the dust grains in the cold gas cloud from which the star and the disk originated.

Research leader Alice Booth (Leiden University): “This is a very exciting and surprising result. Whilst warm methanol has been detected in the warm, young disks, because of the nature of this disk this is the first clear observational evidence that complex organic molecules can be ‘inherited’ from the earlier cold dark clouds phase.”

The star HD 100546 has a large protoplanetary disk. In 2013, a possible planet-in-the-making was found in the cold outer region of this disk (orange dot). Today’s study is about the warmer inner part of the disk. The black spots in the image are artefacts. Credit: ESO/NASA/ESA/Ardila et al.

The researchers made their observations on the planet-forming disk around the much-studied star HD 100546. This disk and star are about 10 million years old and are located about 360 light years from Earth in the direction of the southern constellation of the Fly (Musca).

The researchers used the ALMA observatory, located high up in the Chilean Andes. The astronomers were actually looking for the simple molecule sulfur monoxide, but to their surprise they also detected methanol lines in their spectra.

European Southern Observatory [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte] (EU)/National Radio Astronomy Observatory(US)/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan(JP) ALMA Array in Chile in the Atacama at Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 metres.

In the future, the researchers hope to collect more data so that they can observe the methanol lines at higher spatial resolution. They will also search for more complex oxygen-containing molecules such as dimethyl ether (C2H6O), methyl formate (C2H4O2) and acetaldehyde (C2H4O). These molecules, which are also found in comets and dark clouds, are believed to some of the key ingredients for prebiotic chemistry.

Composed image of the star HD100546 (right) with the methanol reservoir (left) in its warm part of the protoplanetary disk. Credit: ALMA/Booth et al. & ESO/NASA/ESA/Ardila et al.

The researchers want to compare the quantities of these substances in the planet-forming disk with the quantities in comets. This way, they can get a better idea of what proportion of the organic content survives the star formation process. And that, in turn, is important for a better understanding of the chemical processes during the formation of planets. After all, icy asteroids such as comets are the building blocks of planets.

See the full article here.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

NOVA stands for ‘Nederlandse Onderzoekschool Voor Astronomie’, i.e., the ‘Netherlands Research School for Astronomy’. It is the alliance of the astronomical institutes of the University of Amsterdam [Universiteit van Amsterdam](NL), University of Gronigen [Rijksuniversiteit Groningen] (NL), Leiden University [Universiteit Leiden](NL), and Radboud University [Radboud Universiteit](NL). Astronomy is considered to be top-science in The Netherlands. NOVA was selected as top-research school in 1998 following an open national competition, and is as such receiving substantial funding by the Dutch Ministry of Education.

NOVA’s mission is to carry out frontline astronomical research in the Netherlands, to train young ast ronomers at the highest international levels, and to share our new discoveries with society.

NOVA: collaboration

The astronomical institutes at the universities of Amsterdam, Groningen, Leiden and Nijmegen together form NOVA. NOVA closely collaborates with the two other research institutes that are active in the field of astronomy in the Netherlands: The space research institute SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research (NL) and the ASTRON Institute for Radio Astronomy(NL).

Collaboration and coordination of all partners in Dutch astronomy takes place within the Astronomy Council (RvdA) and the creation of decadal strategic plans and midterm updates by the RvdA.

NOVA astronomers rely heavily on the world-class facilities of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) (EU), most notably the VLT telescopes and the ALMA array.

European Southern Observatory(EU) , Very Large Telescope at Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert •ANTU (UT1; The Sun ) •KUEYEN (UT2; The Moon ) •MELIPAL (UT3; The Southern Cross ), and •YEPUN (UT4; Venus – as evening star). Elevation 2,635 m (8,645 ft) from above Credit J.L. Dauvergne & G. Hüdepohl atacama photo.

European Southern Observatory [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte] (EU)/National Radio Astronomy Observatory(US)/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan(JP) ALMA Array in Chile in the Atacama at Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 metres.

A large fraction of the instrument projects that NOVA participates in are targeted at these facilities, as well as the future Extremely Large Telescope.

European Southern Observatory(EU) ELT 39 meter telescope to be on top of Cerro Armazones in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. located at the summit of the mountain at an altitude of 3,060 metres (10,040 ft).