Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2025

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2025 the Ophiuchus star-forming region. These disks composed of gas and dust that form around protostars immediately after their birth are, so to speak, the cradles of planets. The new technique revealed various characteristic disk substructures, in- cluding rings and spirals, that were previously undetectable with con- ventional methods. Notably, these distinctive substructures were found by ALMA Observatory Bárbara Ferreira Protoplanetary disks in high resolution A research team led by Ayumu Shoshi of Kyushu University and the Academia Sinica In- stitute of Astronomy and Astro- physics (ASIAA) revealed proto- planetary disks around protostars that had not been clearly observed in previous analyses, by employing a new imaging technique with sparse modeling on ALMA archival data. The targets were 78 disks in A bove, an artist’s impression of the distinctive substructure in a protoplanetary disk formed a few hundred thousand years after the birth of the central star. [Y. Naka- mura, A. Shoshi et al.] for a significant number of stars in their early formation stages, approx- imately several hundred thousand years after the star birth. This sug-