exoALMA and CfA Provide a New Look at How Planets Are Formed
A gallery of the 15 sources surveyed by the exoALMA program imaged in millimeter-wave carbon monoxide emission. These images are some of the most detailed ever taken of the gas surrounding young stars from which planetary systems form, revealing a striking level of structure that includes gaps, rings and spirals.
Credit: Richard Teague (MIT)
A team of international astronomers have embarked on an exciting new project to hunt for planets forming around young stars. The exoALMA project, using the powerful Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, is peering into the dusty disks where planets are born.
Thanks to newly developed advanced imaging techniques, exoALMA has revealed the most exquisite images of young solar systems, never before seen by astronomers. This research project involved 17 papers published in a special issue of the Astrophysical Journal of Letters, with several more coming this summer.
The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) has played a significant role in exoALMA. Richard Teague, the leader of exoALMA, was a Submillimeter Array Postdoctoral Fellow at the CfA when the project was conceived and proposed in 2021 (he has since joined the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology). The CfA’s Sean Andrews and David Wilner are co-authors on 11 of the latest exoALMA papers.
"The new approaches we’ve developed to gather this data and images are like switching from reading glasses to high-powered binoculars—they reveal a whole new level of detail in these planet-forming systems," said Teague. "We're seeing evidence of hugely perturbed and dynamic disks, highly suggestive of young planets shaping the disks they're born in."
The team targeted 15 young star systems to map the motions of the gas in detail in order to uncover the processes that form planetary systems, and, in certain cases, identify the telltale signs of infant planets, including gaps and rings in the dust disks around stars, swirling motions in the gas caused by a planet's gravity, and physical changes in the disk that might signal a planet's presence.
Unlike traditional planet-hunting methods that look for a young planet's direct light, exoALMA is searching for the effects planets have on their surroundings. This approach allows astronomers to potentially detect much younger planets than ever before.
By leveraging newly developed techniques and the exquisite dataset, the exoALMA team managed to map the density, temperature, and velocity structure of planet-forming disks in unprecedented detail.
Among the most prominent results of this first release of the exoALMA program, the research team shed light on several open questions connected to how planets form.
Looking ahead, the exoALMA project promises to revolutionize scientists' understanding of how planets interact with their natal environments, and tackle the challenge of highly asymmetric sources, as revealed by the complex 2-dimensional kinematical pattern in these disks. The first exoALMA findings are published in a series of papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. All of the data and images will be made publicly available to support further scientific discoveries.
More details on the new exoALMA results are available through NRAO
About the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian is a collaboration between Harvard and the Smithsonian designed to ask—and ultimately answer—humanity's greatest unresolved questions about the nature of the universe. The Center for Astrophysics is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, with research facilities across the U.S. and around the world.
About NRAO
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is a facility of the U.S. National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
About ALMA
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded by ESO on behalf of its Member States, by NSF in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) in Taiwan and by NINS in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI).
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