The ALMA-FAUST revolution: Chemical diversity in young Solar System analogues

Can we reconstruct the origin of our Solar System? At what stage of this process did the chemical complexity that led to life emerge? Answering these questions is one of the most intriguing and exciting challenges of modern astronomical research, fuelled by our curiosity to understand the origin of the Solar System and the prebiotic compounds within it. The advent of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has fundamentally changed our ability to study the physico-chemical evolution of nascent star and planet-forming systems. The unprecedented angular resolution and sensitivity of ALMA allow us to unravel complex processes, such as the accretion and ejection mechanisms that determine the fate of nascent Solar System analogues, and the growth of micrometre-sized dust grains to planetesimal sizes. The observed astrochemical diversity at the different physical scales involved in star- and planet-forming systems, provides unique insights to reconstruct their history. In this Colloquium I will summarize the key results of the ALMA Large Program FAUST (‘Fifty AU STudy of the chemistry in the disc-envelope system of Solar-like protostars’). I will show how the FAUST results have advanced our understanding of chemical and physical evolution of the ISM in emerging planetary systems, and discuss how the next generation of radio facilities, such as the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), will further revolutionize this field.

Dr. Giovanni Sabatini, Astrophysical Observatory of Arcetri (INAF, OAA)

Giovanni Sabatini holds a joint PhD from the Universities of Bologna and Concepción (2021) and has completed a postdoc at the Italian ALMA Regional Centre. He is currently a TD researcher at INAF-OAA, where he investigates the physico-chemical properties of massive and solar-type protostellar systems by combining astrochemical modelling with radioastronomical data (e.g., ALMA, VLA, NOEMA, APEX, IRAM, GBT). He is also part of, or coordinates, international science groups for next-generation interferometers such as the SKA, MeerKAT, and ALMA-2040.