Atacama Large Millimeter Array

At least we hadn't had them until now.

A team of observers using the very large array and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array have now observed more than 300 baby planet-forming disks that are just starting to spin up.

All these systems are part of the great Orion star-forming region.

As astronomers, we will often say things like, "All the stars in a star cluster form at the same time." But the truth is they may gradually come into existence over a million or millions of years, which from the perspective of cosmic time and stellar evolution is all at the same time.

And this discovery actually was made from the archival data from the WMK Observatory at Hawaii in the United States.

And about, Ten years ago, the ALMA telescope at Chile detected a gap in the star's dusky disk.

So if a star is forming, its disk would be filled with dust and debris.

And from that dust and debris of the molecules and some other compounds, they all come together, they accrete each other, and that's how they form as a planet.

It is usually a slow, deliberate accumulation of evidence.

And the mystery of Elias Two Twenty-Four B actually started a full decade ago, not in Hawaii, but high in the Atacama Desert of Chile, using an entirely different array of instruments known as ALMA.

ALMA.

Hey, that stands for the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, right?

Yeah.

Oh, that's a great way to think about it.

The longer wavelength allows them to bypass the physical obstacles.

ALMA uses this principle to peer directly through the dust.

Now, a single absorption line at a single telescope is not enough to stake a career on.

So Greaves and her collaborators, including Sarah Seager, William Baines, and Janusz Patkowski at MIT, and Paul Rimmer at Cambridge, went back in 2019 with the ALMA telescope.

ALMA is a truly staggering instrument.

66 individual radio dishes in the Atacama Desert in Chile, working together as a single telescope.

They observed Venus again, and they got the signal again, at five to seven sigma confidence.

That's not a whisper, that's a shout.

Statistically, a five sigma result means the probability that the signal is a random fluctuation is about one in three and a half million.

They estimated roughly 20 parts per billion of phosphine in the original JCMT data and around five to seven parts per billion in the reprocessed ALMA data.

If you build this array at sea level, you see nothing.

nothing.So we have to travel to the high Atacama Desert in Chile to a facility called ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, which honestly sounds like a villain's lair from a sci-fi movie.

It really does look like one, too.

It's a collection of sixty-six massive radio antennas sitting at an altitude so high the air is just bone dry.

Up in the Atacama, ALMA has a crystal clear window into the deep cosmos.

But the real genius of ALMA isn't just the location, is it? It's how those sixty-six antennas work together.

Right, through a process called interferometry.

Let me see if I have the mechanics of interferometry right because it is wild.

We are totally at a cliffhanger.

The physics community is waiting on the ALMA array and the Chandra satellite to give us the final verdict.

But I want to leave you with a final lingering thought to ponder long after this deep dive ends.

Think about the incredible irony of the cosmos.