Welcome to the European ALMA Regional Centre Newsletter!
This monthly newsletter is a compilation of recent European ALMA Regional Centre news and announcements, showcases an exciting ALMA science result by European colleagues and announces upcoming ALMA and ALMA-related meetings and I-TRAIN sessions. In the "Meet the ARC" section, the work of ARC personnel and the services and expertise areas of an ARC node are highlighted. Every month, you can learn an interesting ALMA fact in "Did you know" and give your opinion about a particular ALMA matter in the "Poll of the month". You can also connect with the European ALMA Regional Centre via social media!
The ALMA Director, on behalf of the Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) and the partner organizations in East Asia, Europe, and North America, is pleased to announce the ALMA Cycle 11 Call for Proposals (CfP) for scientific observations to be scheduled from October 2024 to September 2025.
Oracle have reported a serious incompatibility between macOS Sonoma 14.4 and Java which may result in the OT terminating unexpectedly. Users are advised to update their operating systems to macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 which fixes this issue.
Top panel: An extended streamer of material is observed in the 13CO(2-1) moment 1 map around the binary Class II source S CrA. Bottom panels: 13CO position-position-velocity diagrams. After isolating and binning the streamer's emission (see red squares), this is fitted with TIPSY, as shown by the black curve and dots.
Planets are known to form within disks around young stars nestled in star-forming clouds. Traditionally, it is assumed that the surrounding clouds do not influence the disk evolution and planet formation processes during the Class II stage, that is when the natal envelope is dispersed and the disk is fully visible. However, recent observations of streamers-like features, potentially representing falling material onto planet-forming disks, have challenged this perspective.
Until now, streamers discovered around Class II sources were not dynamically confirmed to track material falling onto the disks. Furthermore, the scientific community lacked the tools to analyze and quantify their impact. To ascertain the infalling nature of these observed structures and to quantify how they affect the evolution of protostellar systems, Gupta et al. 2024 developed the open-source code TIPSY (Trajectory of Infalling Particles in Streamers around Young stars).
TIPSY was used to analyse streamers around a Class II binary source, S CrA, and the slightly younger well-known Class I/II source, HL Tau observed with ALMA respectively in 13CO and HCO+ emission. The morphology and kinematics of both streamers was found to be consistent with infalling motion. Furthermore, using TIPSY, the authors estimated the mass infall rates for the streamers around S CrA and HL Tau to be > 27 MJupiter Myr-1 and > 5 MJupiter Myr-1, respectively. For S CrA, this is the first estimate of mass infall rate for a streamer around a Class II source. The derived mass infall rates suggest that streamers can significantly increase the mass budget available in these disks to form planets. New observations of streamers around Class II disks are expected from ALMA in the coming years, and TIPSY will allow us to characterise the occurrence and significance of such late-accretion events.
Meet the ARC
Dr. Giuliana Cosentino
Giuliana joined the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching as a research fellow in November 2023. Before this role, Giuliana served as fellow at Chalmers University of Technology and obtained her PhD from University College of London. Within the ESO ARC, Giuliana's duties include quality assurance through weblog review and astronomer-on-duty shifts. She is also involved in the BRAIN project for the development of ALMAsim.
Giuliana's research focusses on the formation of massive stars in molecular clouds and on the importance of stellar feedback and cloud-cloud collisions for this process. For this, she uses both single-dish (IRAM, APEX) and interferometers (ALMA, NOEMA) to trace the presence of large-scale shocks in molecular clouds. In parallel, Giuliana is also interested in how shocks affect the chemical properties of molecular clouds.
Join the online ALMA training events!
The European ARC Network invites you to the next session of the online training series I-TRAIN, which will be:
The ALMA Observing Tool - 11th April 2024
You can find further details on this session below. You can access or subscribe to the calendar of sessions at [calendar URL][iCal address].
Please contact us by submitting a ticket to the ALMA HelpDesk (Department "General Queries") if you wish to provide your feedback on I-TRAIN. Information on the I-TRAIN sessions, including legacy materials and links to YouTube videos from previous sessions, are available in the Science Portal.
The poll will be closed on the 8th of April. If the actual number of submitted proposals falls in the maximum bin of this poll, the European ARC will publish a funny surprise in one of the following newsletter editions.
ALMA poll results February 2024
Did you know...
that the preparations for the wideband sensitivity upgrade (WSU) are in full swing now? From the next edition, the newsletter will contain a section about the WSU that will inform the readers about the progress of the project.
