The environments forming stellar and planetary systems

@misc{kuffmeier2026environments,
  title = {{The environments forming stellar and planetary systems}},
  author = {Michael Kuffmeier and Jaime E. Pineda and Peter Schilke and Jes K. Jørgensen and Korash Assani and Alain Baudry and Maite Beltrán and Eleonora Bianchi and Claudio Codella and Laura Colzi and Audrey Coutens and Timea Csengeri and Maria Drozdovskaya and Vardan Elbakyan and Francesco Fontani and Gary Fuller and Josep Miquel Girart and Katharine Johnston and Pamela Klaassen and Rolf Kuiper and Sébastien Maret and Nagayoshi Ohashi and Linda Podio and Víctor M. Rivilla and Giovanni Sabatini and Patricio Sanhueza and Dominique Segura-Cox and Kei Tanaka and Maxime Tanious and Fengwei Xu and Yao-Lun Yang and Qizhou Zhang},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.22462},
  eprint = {2610.22462},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22462},
  note = {CC BY 4.0},
}

TY  - UNPB
TI  - The environments forming stellar and planetary systems
AU  - Michael Kuffmeier
AU  - Jaime E. Pineda
AU  - Peter Schilke
AU  - Jes K. Jørgensen
AU  - Korash Assani
AU  - Alain Baudry
AU  - Maite Beltrán
AU  - Eleonora Bianchi
AU  - Claudio Codella
AU  - Laura Colzi
AU  - Audrey Coutens
AU  - Timea Csengeri
AU  - Maria Drozdovskaya
AU  - Vardan Elbakyan
AU  - Francesco Fontani
AU  - Gary Fuller
AU  - Josep Miquel Girart
AU  - Katharine Johnston
AU  - Pamela Klaassen
AU  - Rolf Kuiper
AU  - Sébastien Maret
AU  - Nagayoshi Ohashi
AU  - Linda Podio
AU  - Víctor M. Rivilla
AU  - Giovanni Sabatini
AU  - Patricio Sanhueza
AU  - Dominique Segura-Cox
AU  - Kei Tanaka
AU  - Maxime Tanious
AU  - Fengwei Xu
AU  - Yao-Lun Yang
AU  - Qizhou Zhang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/15
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.22462
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22462
AB  - How does a star's birth environment set the mass, angular momentum and chemical complexity delivered to its planet-forming disk, and thereby whether it builds planets, brown dwarfs or stellar companions? This requires following material from the cloud to the sub-au to few-au scales where infalling gas, magnetized winds and the disk interact, across all star-forming environments. At frequencies where young disks are optically thin, current facilities, even ALMA after its Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade, fall short by a factor of a few in angular resolution and an order of magnitude in sensitivity. Likewise, resolving how disks around distant high-mass stars fragment into tight multiples requires a linear resolution of a few to a few tens of au, currently out of reach. Yet the disks characterized so far lie almost exclusively in nearby, isolated clouds at near-solar metallicity, although the environment (radiation field, ionization rate, gas and stellar density, pressure and metallicity) varies by orders of magnitude across the Galaxy. Most stars, probably including the Sun, form in clustered regions at kpc distances, and the widest metallicity range lies farther still, in the outer Galaxy, the Central Molecular Zone and the Magellanic Clouds. With three times finer angular resolution and ten times the sensitivity, ALMA2040 will follow the path of material from cloud to disk across the full stellar-mass spectrum and, for the first time, measure how this path changes with environment: resolving the sub-au infall-impact and wind-launching zones nearby, disk fragmentation and the onset of multiplicity in distant high-mass regions, and disk formation at a few tenths of solar metallicity. It will thereby reveal the dust-obscured, embedded origins of planetary systems that optical and infrared facilities, including the ELT, see only once they emerge, and show how the birth environment shapes them.
ER  -