ALMA-DOT

How have planets formed in the Solar System? And what chemical composition did they inherit from their natal environment? Is the chemical composition passed unaltered from the earliest stages of the formation of the Sun to its disk and then to the planets which assembled in the disk? Or does it reflects chemical processes occurring in the disk and/or during the planet formation process? And what was the role of comets in the delivery of volatiles and prebiotic compounds to early Earth? 


To answer these questions we observe protoplanetary disks around young Sun-like stars and compare their chemical composition with that of the early Solar System, which is imprinted in comets. The ALMA-DOT observational campaign is dedicated to investigate the chemical composition of young protoplanetary disks in the Taurus star forming region by exploiting the unprecedented combination of high angular resolution and sensitivity of the ALMA millimetre arrays of antennas. ALMA-DOT allows us to obtain images of young disks at ~20-40 au resolution and to recover the radial/vertical distribution and abundance of simple diatomic molecules (CO and CN), S-bearing molecules (CS, SO, SO2, H2CS), as well as simple organics (H2CO and CH3OH) which are the building blocks for the formation of prebiotic compounds.