Announcement

ESOcast 132: Why Astronomers Want to Use ALMA — We are Stardust!

12 October 2017

How can we find out more about the origins of life on Earth? Well, we can leave Earth behind and instead look out into the Universe. The atoms that make up our bodies can only be made in the high pressure and high temperature environments of stars. When stars end their lives, sometimes in spectacular supernova explosions, the atoms that they made within them are spread across space where they form the next generation of stars and planets. In the clouds from which stars and planets form, the atoms bond together to form molecules.

ESOcast 132 describes how ALMA can be used to observe many different molecules throughout the farthest reaches of the Universe, including some that are needed for life, .

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