Abstract:
Stars like our Sun are forming everywhere in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. ALMA stands for Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array and is currently the largest radio interferometry array on Earth. With its unprecedented sensitivity and resolution, we have mapped a few young star-forming regions in great detail, making a few breakthrough discoveries in the study of star formation. In this talk, I will first briefly introduce the current theory of star and planet formation with some ALMA results. Then, I will present our ALMA results of star formation in detail. In particular, I will report our results of accretion disks and jets around the forming stars and discuss their formation mechanisms. The accretion disks are expected to evolve later into protoplanetary disks in which planets are formed. I will also report the detection of more than 10 organic molecules including prebiotic molecules in one of the accretion disks. These molecules could be passed down to protoplanetary disks and thus incorporated into the planets to be formed later.