New Discoveries ALMA helps discover strange sideways structure in distant black hole jet

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Did life originate in space?

Did you know that you are made of star stuff? It’s true! Many of the atoms in your body were created in other stars. It’s one of the most exciting discoveries in science ever made.

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Have you ever noticed that owls have big eyes? That’s because they live at night. During the dark, you need really big eyes to see anything at all. The bigger your eyes, the more light they collect. Bigger eyes are more sensitive.

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Is ALMA a telescope?

Did you ever try to count the stars in the sky? It’s almost impossible – there’s just too many of them! On a clear, dark night, you can see thousands of stars. Too much to count. Sometimes, you can also see the Milky Way as a faint band of light that stretches across the sky.

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Is there a lot to see?

ALMA is located in the Atacama Desert. When thinking about a desert, you probably imagine a vast, boring stretch of hot sand, with the occasional palm tree. But the Atacama is very different.

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New discoveries

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ALMA helps discover strange sideways structure in distant black hole jet

Astronomers have obtained the sharpest image ever of the powerful jet of material from a giant black hole, and they made a surprising discovery. Black holes are regions in space with so much gravity that they gobble up everything in their neighborhood. Almost all of the gas is falling into the black hole, but a…

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Wide binary stars can have tilted disks

Imagine a bride and a groom, whirling around each other in a romantic dance. The guests at the wedding party are all walking around the couple in one direction, like cars on a roundabout. Both the dancing pair and their wedding guests are on the same floor. A scientist would say: they all move in…

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Cosmic ray particles disturb composition of Titan’s atmosphere

A sand storm is not the best place to cook a meal or to bake a cake. The sand particles might contaminate and affect the ingredients, and the end result would taste badly. In space, too, particles from outside may affect the way molecules are ‘cooked’. Using ALMA, astronomers have found evidence for this process…

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Tracing back one of the ingredients of life

If you bake a cake, you need all kinds of ingredients, like flour, butter, sugar and eggs. You can’t make something from nothing! Likewise, when life first emerged on our planet, it needed its own ingredients. Some of those, like carbon and oxygen, are readily available in the universe. But for other ingredients of life,…

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