Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2026

JULY-AUGUST 2026 ALMA witnesses star birth beyond the Milky Way A stronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/ submillimeter Array (ALMA) to map, for the first time, the mass distribution of the gas and dust clumps from which new stars are born—the so-called core mass func- tion (CMF)—in a star-forming region outside the Milky Way. The study, led by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics and pub- lished in Nature Communications , by ALMA Observatory Bárbara Ferreira T he image shows the 30 Dor-10 region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope through a filter that highlights emission from ionized gas. The box on the left represents one of the two clusters consid- ered in this study, “Clump 52,” as seen by ALMA before these new results, at a resolution of approximately 20,000 astronomical units. The box on the right shows the stunning new images at 2,000 astronomical units, where the cluster can be seen separating into two protoclusters. The brightest and most massive one is in the bottom-right box. [A. Traficante et al.] focuses on the 30 Dor-10 region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a near- by galaxy located about 160,000 light-years from Earth. ALMA’s com- bination of high sensitivity and an- gular resolution enables the reso-