New discoveries

Forty years ago, in February 1987, a cosmic explosion took place in the southern sky. It was first discovered by astronomers Ian Shelton and Oscar Duhalde, at an observatory in Chile. But this was not the ALMA observatory. Back then, ALMA hadn’t been built yet. No one even had...

A thermostat is a device that can regulate the temperature in your living room. If it becomes too cold, the thermostat fires up the central heating. If it becomes too hot, the heating is shut down. Now, using ALMA, astronomers have discovered something like a cosmic thermostat in a...

Have you ever watched an ice skater performing a pirouette? As she draws in her arms, she automatically starts to rotate much faster. In fact, every rotating object that gets smaller will speed up its spin rate – it’s a law of nature. So the same is also true...

ALMA has done something that you should never do yourself. The huge observatory in northern Chile has stared directly into the Sun. It’s something that no living person ever should try. The bright light of the Sun would damage your eyes. In the past, people have even become blind...

If you want to cook up a nice meal, you need the right ingredients. Without beans, you can’t make a good chili. And to bake an apple pie, you need apples, of course. In the Universe, it’s the same. The available ingredients determine what can be ‘cooked up’.  One...

Billions of years ago, the Universe experienced a baby boom of new stars. Back then, the number of stars that were born in galaxies was much higher than it is now. New observations by ALMA have revealed new information about those early galaxies. In particular, ALMA has found ‘pregnant’’...

ALMA has helped to solve a fifteen-year-old astronomical riddle. Observations with the 66-dish observatory have revealed the true nature of a huge mysterious object in the distant universe.  The object is known as LAB-1. LAB stands for Lyman Alpha Blob. It’s a huge smudge of light in the night...

Almost every galaxy in the Universe has a massive black hole in its core. With its gravity, the black hole sucks in material from its surroundings. It gobbles up clouds of gas and dust, and maybe even complete stars. The black hole’s ‘food’ first piles up in a thin,...

Morning fog disappears when the sun rises. Can you imagine what happens when the sun would be much hotter and brighter? The fog will disappear much sooner, of course.  Astronomers believed that the same would be true for newborn stars. They are often surrounded by disks of dust and...

What happens if you throw little sticks or dry pine needles in a camp fire? The flames get brighther and the air gets warmer, right? Something similiar happens with new born stars!  A few million years after they are born, most stars are surrounded by a disk of swirling...

Stars are born from large clouds of cold gas. It’s called molecular gas, since it is composed not of single atoms, but of molecules like H2 (two hydrogen atoms strung together) and carbon monoxide (CO, a molecule consisting of one atom of carbon and one of oxygen). Molecular hydrogen...

Astronomers have detected oxygen in a distant galaxy. The galaxy is so far away that its light has taken 13.1 billion years to reach us. That means that we see the galaxy as it was 13.1 billion years ago, when the Universe was ‘only’ 700 million years old. So...