ALMA Digs Deeper into the Mystery of Planet Formation

An international research team used ALMA to observe disks around 19 protostars with a very high resolution to search for the earliest signs of planet formation. This survey, called "Early Planet Formation in Embedded Disks (eDisk)" and led by Nagayoshi Ohashi at Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA, Taiwan), was motivated by the recent findings that planet formation may be well-underway in the more-evolved protoplanetary disks that have been studied in detail with ALMA, but until now there had been no systematic study to search for signs of planet formation in younger protostellar systems.

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The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) -the largest astronomical project in existence- is a single telescope of revolutionary design, composed of 66 high precision antennas located in northern Chile. ALMA is an international partnership of ESO (Europe), NSF (U.S) and NINS (Japan) together with NRC (Canada), MOST and ASIAA (Taiwan), and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile We love the Cosmos!