In addition to spotting high-energy events like FRBs, radio telescopes also allow us to see processes in the sky that are blacked by gas and dust and hidden from our optical light telescopes. This is what has made them such amazing tools for studying baby stars and their surrounding disks that may someday form solar systems. Radio telescopes, however, are not all equally able to peer through the dust. The much-beloved ALMA, for instance, sees the sky in wavelengths of light that are measured in millimeters and fractions of millimeters. And this lets them see many planet-forming disks in amazing detail. 

What has confused many, however, is ALMA’s inability to make out twin disks in the youngest of binary star systems. These very young warm disks are called “hot corinos”, and they are rich in complex organic molecules that can seed forming planets with the chemistry needed to someday form life. Since both stars in binary systems are expected to form at the same time, it’s expected they’ll form corinos and eventually planets at the same time. But with ALMA, only one star has ever been seen to have the corino. So scientists decided to go long, and use the Very Large Array (VLA) to look for light from corinos in centimeter wavelengths, and they found them. 

According to Principal Investigator Claire Chandler from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), “We decided to look for evidence of these chemicals at longer wavelengths that can easily pass through dust. It struck us that dust might be what was preventing us from detecting the molecules in one of the twin protostars.” This difference in dust may be an alignment issue or due to interactions between the two systems. Interestingly, corinos haven’t been seen in single-star systems, yet. It will be interesting to see if this “go long” with a centimeter light approach allows more of these earliest stages in planetary disk formation to be seen.

More Information

National Radio Astronomy Observatory press release 

 “Hot Corinos Chemical Diversity: Myth or Reality?” Marta De Simone et al., 2020 June 8, Astrophysical Journal Letters