Archaic period hunter-gatherers of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico, created complex rock art murals containing elaborately painted anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures. These figures are frequently portrayed with dots or lines emanating out of or into their open mouths. In this article, we discuss patterns in shape, color, and arrangement of this pictographic element and propose that artists used this graphic device to denote speech, breath, and the soul. They communicated meaning through the image-making process, alternating brushstroke direction to indicate inhalation versus exhalation or using different paint application techniques to reflect measured versus forceful speech. The choices made by artists in the production of the imagery reflect their cosmology and the framework of ideas and beliefs through which they interpreted and interacted with the world. Bridging the iconographic data with ethnohistoric and ethnographic texts from Mesoamerica, we suggest that speech and breath expressed in the rock art of the Lower Pecos was tied to concepts of the soul, creation, and human origins.

Study of the composition from diverse sources of the Universe helps to us to understand their evolution. Molecular spectroscopy provides detailed information of the observed objects. We present a small study of the starburst NGC 253 with ALMA at 1mm. We detect the prebiotic molecules NH2CHO, and CNCHO. We obtain the integrated intensity maps and abundances of HNCO, CH3OH, H3O+ and CH3C2H. We propose the use of Artificial Intelligence for big data to find prebiotic molecules in galaxies.

Young low-mass protostellar sources are known to show significant chemical diversity in their envelopes at a few 1000s au scale; two distinct cases are hot corino chemistry and warm carbon-chain chemistry (WCCC). It is of great interest how the chemical diversity is inherited to chemistry of disk-forming regions. With the recent ALMA observations, we found that the chemical diversity in envelopes is indeed delivered into the disk-forming regions at a 100 au scale. Moreover, the chemical composition changes drastically from envelopes to disks. We also found sources with the hybrid chemical characteristics; both hot corino chemistry and WCCC occur in spatially separated parts of a single source. This hybrid case may be a common occurrence, while hot corinos and WCCC sources are regarded as distinct cases. This unified view of chemistry in disk-forming regions will be an important clue to tracing the chemical evolution from protostellar cores to protoplanetary disks.

We have analyzed rotational spectral line emission of OCS, CH3OH, HCOOCH3, and H2CS observed toward the low-mass Class 0 protostar IRAS 16293–2422 (Source A and B) at a sub-arcsecond resolution with ALMA. Significant chemical differentiation is found at a 50 au scale. OCS is found to trace the infalling-rotating envelope, while COM distributions are concentrated around the inner part of the envelope. The kinematic structure in Source A is explained with a ballistic model, and the protostellar mass and the radius of the centrifugal barrier are evaluated to be ~0.75 M⊙ and ~50 au, respectively. This study has revealed that the centrifugal barrier plays a central role not only in the disk formation but also in the associated chemical evolution.

Leading-edge telescopes such as the Atacama Large Millimeter and sub-millimeter Array (ALMA), and near-future ones, are capable of imaging the same sky area at hundreds-to-thousands of frequencies with both high spectral and spatial resolution. This provides unprecedented opportunities for discovery about the spatial, kinematical and compositional structure of sources such as molecular clouds or protoplanetary disks, and more. However, in addition to enormous volume, the data also exhibit unprecedented complexity, mandating new approaches for extracting and summarizing relevant information. Traditional techniques such as examining images at selected frequencies become intractable while tools that integrate data across frequencies or pixels (like moment maps) can no longer fully exploit and visualize the rich information. We present a neural map-based machine learning approach that can handle all spectral channels simultaneously, utilizing the full depth of these data for discovery and visualization of spectrally homogeneous spatial regions (spectral clusters) that characterize distinct kinematic behaviors. We demonstrate the effectiveness on an ALMA image cube of the protoplanetary disk HD142527. The tools we collectively name “NeuroScope” are efficient for “Big Data” due to intelligent data summarization that results in significant sparsity and noise reduction. We also demonstrate a new approach to automate our clustering for fast distillation of large data cubes.

We report our systematic survey observations of protostellar sources with the SubMillimeter Array (SMA) and Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The purpose of our survey is to investigate formation mechanism of protoplanetary disks, precursors of planetary systems, out of ~1000 AU-scale protostellar envelopes surrounding the protostars. We found that in the early protostars (B335, NGC1333 IRAS 4B), the envelopes do not show significant rotating motions but infalling motions toward the central protostars. In more evolved protostars (L1527 IRS, L1448-mm, L1551 IRS 5), the envelopes are infalling and rotating with the conserved specific angular momenta (that is, vrot ∝ r−1). In most evolved sources (L1551 NE, TMC-1A, L1489 IRS) large-scale (≳100 AU) disks in Keplerian rotation or protoplanetary disks are evident. These results demonstrate a systematic evolutionary trend of envelope gas motions toward the disk formation.

Radio astronomy began with one array (Jansky's) and one paraboloid of revolution (Reber's) as collecting areas and has now reached the point where a large number of facilities are arrays of paraboloids, each of which would have looked enormous to Reber in 1932. In the process, interferometry has contributed to the counting of radio sources, establishing superluminal velocities in AGN jets, mapping of sources from the bipolar cow shape on up to full grey-scale and colored images, determining spectral energy distributions requiring non-thermal emission processes, and much else. The process has not been free of competition and controversy, at least partly because it is just a little difficult to understand how earth-rotation, aperture-synthesis interferometry works. Some very important results, for instance the mapping of HI in the Milky Way to reveal spiral arms, warping, and flaring, actually came from single moderate-sized paraboloids. The entry of China into the radio astronomy community has given large (40-110 meter) paraboloids a new lease on life.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is nearing its phase of full operations. ALMA will collect about 200TB/year of astronomical data which will be reduced by an automatic pipeline and turned into fully calibrated science-ready data products. We present design choices, challenges and solutions from data capturing over data reduction and data distribution to archival research, that allow to deal with the large amounts of data and, hopefully, achieve the maximum amount of science return.

The history of this magic instrument is complex, and the teaching goal was never forgotten. Technological developments of the planetarium enable it now to treat the major topics of astronomy and astrophysics. But by simplifying too much or badly, one is likely to bring confusion in the spirits. The development of the planetarium is a continual challenge, as long as the scientific culture is not integrated perfectly in the cultural landscape. In several countries, planetariums link their knowledge and their know-how, for better resisting to economic difficulties, and better speaking about astronomy to their public. In particular the great project ALMA will be celebrated in a show for the International Year of Astronomy. Today's planetarium works as a theater for all sciences, and can issue a passport to the various scales of the universe