New discoveries

New ALMA observations reveal that the hunt for life beyond Earth is not as easy as some had hoped.  Over the past decades, astronomers have detected more than 3,500 planets orbiting other stars than our own Sun. No one knows if there’s life on some of these planets. Astronomers...

What does this nebula look like? A soap bubble, right?  When you’re blowing soap bubbles, their outer rims are most conspicuous, even though the thin layer of soap has the same thickness everywhere. With this ALMA image, it’s the same. You’re not looking at a ring of glowing gas,...

In some countries, more babies are born than in others. With galaxies, it’s the same: some galaxies have a much higher birth rate of new stars than others. Astronomers have studied six of those so-called starburst galaxies with the ALMA observatory. In five of them, they discovered large amounts...

Suppose you carry a tray with a lot of Lego blocks. More than enough to build a large number of houses. You want to play with your friends, at the center of the city square. But it’s very, very windy there. By the time you reach the center of...

Many people eat chicken, cow or pig. Cruel enough, if you think about it. But eating other people is much worse, of course. Eating your own kind is called cannibalism. Luckily, cannibals are very rare. Now, ALMA has found a cannibal in space: a distant galaxy that is devouring...

A terrestrial volcano is hotter than its surroundings. The same is true for geysers like the ones in Yellowstone National Park in the United States, or in the El Tatio geyser field in northern Chile. The reason: the interior of the Earth is hotter than its surface, and volcanoes...

The planet Saturn is known for its beautiful rings. But Saturn also has dozens of moons. The largest one is called Titan. It’s a bit larger than the planet Mercury and a bit smaller than Mars. And it’s the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere. ...

Thirty years ago, astronomers saw a star exploding in a nearby galaxy. Now, using ALMA, they have imaged the huge cloud of dust that resulted from the explosion.  When a building collapses, it produces a large dust cloud. That’s because buildings are made of stone. The dust is just...

Many stars in the Milky Way galaxy are actually twins – two stars that were born at the same time. Sometimes, such stellar twins form a ‘close binary’: they orbit each other at a small mutual distance. But astronomers have also discovered many ‘wide binaries’, where the twin stars...

Have you ever seen how a magnet creates patterns in a sprinkling of iron filings? Every material that conducts electricity (like iron) responds to magnetic forces. In the universe, magnetic fields are important, too. They strongly influence the motions of gas particles. Little wonder then that magnetic fields also...

Sometimes, scientists are like little children. They always ask ‘why?’. That’s because they want to understand everything they see. A lot of ‘why questions’ have already been answered, like ‘why is the sky blue?’ and ‘why is the sun hot?’. But many remain. So when astronomers discovered a distant...

Here’s the story of the birth of a massive star. It all starts with a huge cloud of gas and dust. The cloud contracts under its own gravity. It gets smaller and denser. It also starts to rotate faster and faster. Due to the rotation, the cloud begins to...