Historic! ALMA telescope finds first-ever planet-forming disk beyond the Milky Way Galaxy
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A groundbreaking discovery has been made by astronomers who identified a swirling disk of material, akin to those surrounding infant stars in the Milky Way Galaxy feeding a young star situated in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy located 160,000 light-years away. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the largest Earth-based astronomical project comprising 66 antennas in Northern Chile, the research team led by Durham University scientist Anna McLeod observed the system designated HH 1177 within a massive gas cloud. This marks the first confirmed extragalactic accretion disk ever detected.First Glimpse of an Extragalactic Accretion Disk"When I first saw evidence for a rotating structure in the ALMA data, I could not believe that we had detec...