New Discoveries Fat Stars Grow Just Like Skinny Stars

Welcome to the ALMA website for kids!

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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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Fat Stars Grow Just Like Skinny Stars

How much did you weigh when you were born? Most newborns are between 3 and 4 kilograms at birth. But not all. Some babies weigh much more or much less. It all depends on how fast they grew. With baby stars, it’s the same. Most newborn stars can have different masses, and most weigh less...

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Triple star stirs up its own protoplanetary disk

If a single star has planets, the planets usually orbit the star in a single plane. Such is the case in our own solar system: the orbits of the planets are ‘aligned’, as astronomers say. If a close binary star has planets, the situation is different. The two stars can orbit each other in one...

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Ring-like galaxy is actually a distant twin of the Milky Way

Have you ever seen a galaxy that looks like a wedding ring? This image, obtained by ALMA, shows a galaxy known as SPT 0418-47. It is extremely far away: the galaxy’s light took 12.4 billion years to reach Earth. According to the astronomers who took the image, it looks very much like our own Milky...

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Sizing up Antares

So you thought the Sun is big? True, the Sun’s diameter is more than one hundred times as large as the diameter of the Earth. Pretty big. But some stars in our Milky Way galaxy are much larger. Using ALMA and radio telescopes in the USA, astronomers have now measured the extent of the outermost...

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