Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2019

33 MARCH-APRIL 2019 SPACE CHRONICLES the earliest stages of planetary forma- tion. We will have to investigate more systems to find out if this is a common phenomenon or not.” The remaining question is what caused the warping of the disk. Sakai suggests two reasonable explanations. “One pos- sibility,” she says, “is that irregularities in the flow of gas and dust in the proto- stellar cloud are still preserved and man- ifest themselves as the warped disk. A second possibility is that the magnetic field of the protostar is in a different plane from the rotational plane of the disk, and that the inner disk is being pulled into a different plane from the rest of the disk by the magnetic field.” She says they plan further work to de- termine which is responsible for the warping of the disk. A rtist’s impression of a warped disk around a proto- star. ALMA observed the protostar IRAS04368+2557 in the dark cloud L1527 and discovered that the proto- star has a disk with two misaligned parts. [RIKEN] W hirling southern star trails over ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/ submillimeter Array) located in northern Chile. [ESO/Babak Tafreshi] !