Nascent gas giant planets may be lurking in dusty disk

Nurseries for new planets, protostellar disks are oblate swathes of gas and dust that rotate about newly formed stars. The Earth and the other planets in the solar system were birthed from such a disk.

Young open cluster NGC 602 inspected with ALMA

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have investigated a young open cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), known as NGC 602. Results of the research, presented August 29 on the ...

First-ever detection of gas in a circumplanetary disk

Scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and partners at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) have made the first-ever detection of gas in an circumplanetary disk. What's more, the ...

Hubble's double take on a spiral galaxy

The magnificent spiral galaxy M99 fills the frame in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. M99—which lies roughly 42 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices—is a "grand design" ...

A new catalog of infrared dark clouds

Infrared dark clouds (IRDCs) are dark patches of cold dust and gas seen in the sky against the bright diffuse infrared glow of warm dust in our galaxy. These IRDCs, massive and rich in molecules, are natural sites for star ...

A submillimeter survey of protostars

The formation of stars involves the complex interactions of many phenomena, including gravitational collapse, magnetic fields, turbulence, stellar feedback, and cloud rotation. The balance between these effects varies significantly ...

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