Colloquium on Mar. 3, 2022

Pushing ALMA to its limit: long-baseline, multi-band, high-frequency, and polarization observations of star forming regions in the Galaxy

Speaker: Xing Lu (SHAO)

Venue: SWIFAR Building 2111

Time: 16:00 PM, Thursday, Mar. 3, 2022

Abstract:

ALMA has been in operation for years and produced numerous discoveries, thanks to its capabilities of high angular resolution, high sensitivity, and large bandwidth. These capabilities are especially important for studies of Galactic star formation, where we need to spatially resolve star forming regions to detect physical and chemical conditions in faint sources that may give birth to stars and planets. In this talk, I will introduce my recent work as well as future plans to make use of ALMA's most formidable power, to explore the details of star formation, using data from my four Grade-A PI projects and many other PI or collaborative projects. These include the discovery of a Keplerian protostellar disk toward the Galactic Center by using long-baseline data; thousand to hundred-AU multi-scale multi-band observations of massive filamentary clouds in the Galactic disk to study gas fragmentation and accretion; an on-going tomography of a massive cloud using molecular lines at four different wavelengths from Band 3 (90 GHz) to Band 8 (460 GHz); and an on-going first characterization of core-scale magnetic fields around the Galactic Center using polarization observations. Lastly I will introduce opportunities for Chinese colleagues to obtain and make use of high-quality ALMA data.