Luca Ricci (CSUN) -- Witnessing the Formation of Planetary Systems with ALMA

The discovery of substructures in the sub-millimeter emission from young proto-planetary disks is arguably one of the most striking achievements of ALMA so far. High-angular resolution observations of nearby young disks have established that their sub-mm continuum emission shows rings, gaps, spirals and other asymmetric structures on spatial scales down to the resolution limit of the observations, i.e., > 5 astronomical units. These observations have spawned a variety of different theoretical investigations in the field of planet formation and interaction with the parental disk that are changing our understanding of how planets come to be. In this talk I will describe the main results of these recent ALMA observations, and present possible future advancement in this field with the Next Generation Very Large Array.