Mondo Knows Facts
ALMA photographed a planet's birth disk
The 2014 image of HL Tauri showed rings and gaps carved in dust The Atacama Large Millimeter Array combines 66 antennas on a plateau 5,000 metres up in Chile. Its submillimetre view of HL Tauri, roughly 450 light years away, resolved concentric gaps in a disk only about a million years old. The gaps suggest young planets were already sweeping clear lanes. It sits in Mondo's space collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Tags: alma, protoplanetary, imaging
ALMA photographed a planet's birth disk: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- The 2014 image of HL Tauri showed rings and gaps carved in dust. The figure is taken from NASA Science, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a space fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Space shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.