Project
Radio interferometer of 66 antennas high in Chile's Atacama Desert, used to study planet formation, galaxies, and other millimeter-wavelength phenomena.
COMPASS, an ALMA survey of 11 low-mass protostars, detected methanol masers around more than half of them, the first at that mass. A deuterium-bearing form of methanol turned up at only one of the 11, IRAS 4A2, so that result is a single case.
Reality
Raghvendra Sahai's team used ALMA to find a ring of radius about 16,950 Earth-sun distances around the preplanetary nebula IRAS 06530. The team says it records the star's last flare-up, but the spectra show no gas faster than 16.5 km/s, below the fast outflows a binary-jet origin should produce.
Reality
ALMA's COMPASS survey found methanol masers around more than half of the 11 infant sun-like stars it studied. The survey puts organic chemistry around stars that are still forming, though its first papers do not trace any of it into a planet.
Reality
Elias 2-24 b sits in a disk gap 55 times Earth's distance from its star, where formation models ask for at least five million years to build a Jupiter. Keck coronagraph images from 2018 and 2020 put it under a million years old.
Perspective Coverage
5 publishersReality
MPIA astronomers used ALMA to image WISPIT 2b, a gas giant five times Jupiter's mass, interacting with the gas it formed in. Formation models have rested on simulations and indirect evidence, so a planet still feeding on its birth gas gives them a direct check.
Reality
Zihao Wu and colleagues report a candidate overdensity of 18 galaxies at a redshift of about 10.5 in JWST's JADES survey, with photometric hints that the group has cleared an ionized bubble roughly 6 comoving megaparsecs in radius.
Reality
The first millimetre imaging of Betelgeuse since the 2020 dimming shows an inner atmosphere growing lopsided, and whether its newly found companion shaped that pattern depends on an orbital geometry the team has yet to measure.
Reality
ALMA's compact array found ten molecules around HD 87643, six of them sulfur-bearing, where only carbon monoxide had been seen. One isotope ratio does not fit standard nuclear physics.
Reality
Higher-resolution mapping turns star-forming clouds into comparisons rather than catalogues, but first someone has to check that the finer maps agree with the ones built over previous decades.
Reality