New discoveries

Every breath you take contains a lot of oxygen. Oxygen gas is an important ingredient of our atmosphere. Without it, there would be no human life on Earth. Astronomers know that all oxygen atoms in the Universe were produced in stars. When the Universe was born in the Big...

Stars are born from collapsing clouds of gas and dust. But the material in the cloud doesn’t directly fall into the newborn star. Instead, it first heaps up in a flattened, rotating disk. And that poses a problem to astronomers. The disk rotates pretty fast, so how does the...

Planet Earth is surrounded by an atmosphere – a thin layer of gas. Some other planets, and most stars, also have atmospheres. In many cases, they’re much more extended than the atmosphere of Earth. ALMA has now discovered two young galaxies that really take the biscuit: their ‘atmospheres’ extend...

Do you see the large ‘hole’ in this ALMA image? It looks as if someone cut a circular hole in a blue veil, with a large cluster of galaxies right behind the hole. But appearances can be deceiving. In fact, the ‘blue veil’ originates behind the galaxy cluster. It’s...

Have you ever experienced a growth spurt? Three times within a year or so, you need new T-shirts or new shoes, just because you’re growing so fast. It happens with teenagers, but also with baby stars. By comparing new ALMA observations with older measurements from another observatory, astronomers have...

Suppose you live in a very big house, with lots of families, each one with many children. Every month or so, a new baby is born, so you know all about it. You wonder about childbirth in other houses. But the nearest big house is many miles away, and...

ALMA has set a new record. It has observed a galaxy known as A2744_YD4 – the most distant galaxy ever studied by the 66-dish observatory. The galaxy is so remote that its light took a whopping 13.2 billion years to reach Earth. This means that astronomers are seeing the...

Nobody knows how life got going here on Earth. But a new ALMA discovery may help solve this riddle. ALMA studied a group of newborn stars. They are surrounded by cocoons of gas and dust – the material from which they formed. These young ‘proto-stars’ are very much like...

Planets around other stars are hard to spot. In most cases, they are just too small. But a planetary system can betray its existence in other ways. ALMA has imaged a ‘ring’ of icy debris around the nearby star Fomalhaut. This ring can only be explained if Fomalhaut has...

Astronomers have detected a beautiful spiral pattern in the disk of material around a young star. It looks like the gas in the disk is somehow stirred up, probably by one or two planets.  Young stars are surrounded by flat disks of gas and dust. The star AB Aurigae...

You may remember that Pluto is now classed as something called a “Dwarf Planet”. As well as Pluto, there are four other dwarf planets in our Solar System: Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris. Plus, there may be a new member joining the family very soon – an object nicknamed...

Human babies can scream and cry, but they’re not strong enough to tear down their own cot, let alone the nursery where they’re born. With baby stars, however, it’s different. Astronomers have discovered a stellar nursery that’s partly blown apart by its new inhabitants. Apparently, the birth of a...