The turbulent birth of super star clusters in galaxy mergers
By combining two of the most advanced telescopes in the world -- the new Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of ESO -- a team of French astronomers from the Institut d'astrophysique spatiale (IAS- CNRS) led by graduate student Cinthya Herrera has for the first time traced the very first steps in the formation of young super-star clusters in a nearby galaxy merger, the Antennae. This analysis, now published as an Astronomy & Astrophysics letter, not only represents a novel avenue for studying the very early stages of star formation in external galaxies, it is also ALMA's first scientific result ever to be published. It gives a foretaste of how ALMA will revolutionize our views on star formation and galaxy growth.