New discoveries

Have you ever seen a shooting star? It looks like a star that falls down from theheavens. In reality, it’s a grain of space dust that enters Earth’s atmosphere. Becauseof collision with atmosphere, the dust particle evaporates and the air molecules startto glow – that’s the streak of light...

ALMA has detected the building blocks of life in the disk surrounding a young, distant star. The discovery may help astronomers to understand the origin of life in our own solar system. Some 3.5 billion years ago, certain molecules teamed up to form the first living organisms on Earth...

Astronomers using ALMA have discovered that the thin atmosphere of Io is largely due to its activevolcanoes. Io (pronounced EYE-oh) is a large moon of the giant planet Jupiter. Thanks to tidal forces from theplanet, it has a hot interior. The surface of Io is dotted with active volcanoes....

On Earth, more than 350 thousand babies are born each day. If you think that is a lot, take a look at our Universe. In space, more than 100 million stars are born each day. But recently, something mysterious was born, something that astronomers have never seen before. The...

If a single star has planets, the planets usually orbit the star in a single plane. Such is the case in ourown 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...

Not all families are the same. Some have many children; others just a few. In some cases, families live close together in their home town; in other towns they are less numerous, and they live further apart. You might wonder about the cause of all these differences – maybe...

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: thegalaxy’s light took 12.4 billion years to reach Earth. According to the astronomers who took theimage, it looks very much...

A bright comet passed by the Earth in December, and ALMA has studied it in detail. On December 16, comet Wirtanen came as close as 11.4 million kilometers. That’s about thirty times as far as the moon – pretty close for a comet. Around that time, the comet was...

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 telescopesin the USA, astronomers have now measured the...

The black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is twinkling. Well, not exactly. The black hole itself doesn’t emit any light, so it can’t twinkle. But due to its huge gravity, the black hole attracts gas from its immediate surroundings. Before the gas plunges into the...

Disk galaxies like our own Milky Way grew faster than most astronomers expected. That’s the surprising conclusion of a new ALMA discovery. After the Big Bang, some 13.8 billion years ago, atoms first clumped together into small, irregular galaxies. These ‘galactic building blocks’ later merged intolarger and larger systems....

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