Exoalma study reveals beautiful images of structures in protoplanetary discs – Calama online

An international scientific team has embarked on a new and exciting project to search for planets in training around young stars. The exoalma project, using the Large Millimeter/Submillimeter (soul) Atacama in Chile, observed the dusty discs where the planets are born. Thanks to recently developed advanced capture techniques, Exoalma has revealed the most clear images of solar systems in formation never seen before. This research project has generated 17 scientific articles, with several more to publish in the coming months.

“The new approaches that we have developed to collect these data and images are like moving from reading glasses to great power binoculars: they reveal a totally new level of detail in these planetary training systems,” said Richard Teague, principal researcher of the Exoalma project.

Unlike the traditional planet hunting methods, which seek the direct light of a young planet, exoalma seeks the effects that planets in formation have in their environment. This method allows astronomers to detect much younger planets than before. “It’s like trying to discover a fish looking for waves in a pond, instead of trying to see the fish itself,” adds Christophe Pinte (Institute of Astrophysics and Planetology of Grenoble, University of Monash), co-lider of the Exoalma team.

The team highlighted the technical challenges of processing the huge amounts of data to produce such crisp. “We develop new techniques to accurately align the observations taken at different times and eliminate noise and unwanted distortions,” said Dr. Ryan Loomis (NSF NRAO), which directed the publication of the data processing. “We had to carefully combine and clean the data to reveal all subtle details.”

These new calibration approaches and the development of processing techniques and analysis of custom data from the exoalma project will improve the ability of astronomers to map the planet formation process in critical aspects:

• Greater resolution and sensitivity: The observations provide an unprecedented combination of angular high resolution (100 more or 14 au to the typical distances of the sources) and spectral (26 m/s) of the gas emission of the protoplanetary discs, which allows astronomers to detect subtle structures and movements that reveal key processes of planet formation.
• Multiple molecular tracers: by simultaneously observing the emission of 12co, 13co and CS, astronomers can probe different vertical layers and physical conditions inside the discs.
• Imperimed image techniques and calibration: the careful alignment, autocalibration and image procedures developed allow to obtain images of greater loyalty with less artifacts, which allows a more reliable detection of the real characteristics of the disk.
• Development and validation of numerical and analytical methods: the improvement of new analysis techniques together with exhaustive comparative evaluation efforts guarantee that all the information is extracted accurately from the data, while the simulations offer solid predictions that can be tested.