World's most expensive telescope may reveal origin of planets, Earth's oceans

London, Feb 18 (ANI): Scientists hope that the world's most expensive ground-based telescope, the 1.3-billion-dollar ALMA array high in the Chilean Andes, will unravel how planets form, and could solve the mystery of where Earth's oceans came from.

Scientists described the telescope as the biggest leap in the technology since Galileo.

Together with another huge radio telescope, the Very Large Array (VLA), a collection of 27 antennae in New Mexico, ALMA is delivering the first insights into how planets form from the discs of gas and dust around young stars.

The ALMA and VLA telescopes will capture the early stages of how planets form from the disc of dust and gas around young stars, watching as the dust forms into pebbles then finally into young worlds

"These new 'eyes' will allow us to study, at unprecedented scales, the motion of gas and dust in the disks surrounding young stars, and put our theories of planet formation to the test," the Daily Mail quoted David Wilner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as saying.

The new telescopes will capture the first stages of planet formation-the growth of dust grains and pebbles in the disks-as well as show the gravitational interactions between the disks and new planets embedded within them.

"The power of ALMA and the expanded VLA also will allow us to study many more young stars and solar systems - probably thousands - than we could before. This will help us understand the processes that produce the huge diversity we already see in extrasolar planetary systems," Wilner suggested.

One set of early ALMA observations, of a disk around a young star nearly 170 light-years from Earth, promises to shed light on a much closer question-the origin of Earth's oceans.

Scientists think much of our planet's water came from comets bombarding the young Earth, but aren't sure just how much.

The key clue has been the fact that our seawater contains a higher percentage of Deuterium, a form of hydrogen, than is found in the gas between stars.

"With further studies like this, we are on the path to more precisely measuring the percentage of Earth's ocean water that might have come from comets," Wilner added. (ANI)