About 50-70% of the first five years of SKA operations will be devoted to KSPs, and probably also to Generic Surveys that maximize commensality to a wide range of scientific objectives. There are already several proposed KSPs focused on Galactic Science and we foresee many other KSP concepts being submitted under the breadth of Our Galaxy SWG.
SKA, providing better sensitivity and angular...
The ingredients for the recipe to make a “habitable” planet like our own Earth are: a relatively small rocky planet at the right distance from the host star for water to be in the liquid state, and with a not-too-thick atmosphere organic-rich in volatiles and capable of developing organic molecules chemistry. Searches for exoplanets have shown a large degree of diversity in the planetary...
Hot corinos, central planet-forming regions of Solar-like protostars enriched in interstellar Complex Organic Molecules (iCOMs), are the likely analogues of the early Solar System.
Deceivingly, after almost 20 years of hunting, only less than twenty hot corinos are known. Surprisingly, many of them are binaries with the two components showing different millimeter molecular spectra. There are...
In the last six years ALMA revolutionised our comprehension of planet formation. The first breakthrough was delivered by the impactful images of rings and gaps in the dust distribution of young disks, the first direct probe of planet formation at work in disks of age less than 1 Myr. In parallel, ALMA is revolutionising also our comprehension of the disk chemistry, delivering the first...
The formation of a solar type planetary system is characterized by several physical processes that start with the collapse of a cold (≤ 10 K) and dense (≥ 10$^5$cm$^{-3}$) prestellar core into a protostar, a protoplanetary disk and, eventually, a planetary system. These stages are also accompanied by the evolution of the chemical composition (e.g. Caselli & Ceccarelli 2012), which is a...
The emission budget from astrophysical sources at microwave frequencies is mostly dominated by the well-studied and well-understood free-free, synchrotron, and thermal dust emission. Nevertheless, observations mainly carried out in our Galaxy have revealed an unexpected excess of emission (Anomalous Microwave Emission, AME) in the microwave band that cannot be explained by standard emission...
