text: 126,140,1301112675754221570,131879500,John Ilee,"Excited to announce our new paper out today. We examine how the Square Kilometre Array (SKA, @SKA_telescope) will be able to observe and characterise planet-hosting young discs: <LINK> <LINK> We show that SKA1-MID will be able to observe the emission of cm-sized pebbles in such a disc, and particularly any gap/ring structure that is carved by planets forming. This is thanks to its extremely high resolution (and sensitivity).  Just look at that uv coverage... 🤤 <LINK> ALMA has made amazing progress at this over the past few years, but it is becoming clear that (sub)mm observations may not trace the bulk of the disc material. Moving to the cm overcomes this, and SKA will be key in determining accurate disc properties (watch this space). Huge thanks to @cassidentprone, @cwalshastrochem, Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, Christophe Pinte, Jason Terry, Tyler Bourke, and Melvin Hoare for helping pull this together (and of course @SKA_telescope!). We're planning a few more papers in this series, so keep an eye out for those. Finally, my curiosity got the better of me. I decided to see what something like HL Tau might look like with the SKA. Result: It's VERY cool (though a little artistic freedom applies here). The late 2020's will be exciting! <LINK>",https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.00562,"High angular resolution observations of discs at mm wavelengths (on scales of a few au) are now commonplace, but there is a current lack of a comparable angular resolution for observations at cm wavelengths. This presents a significant barrier to improving our understanding of planet formation, in particular how dust grains grow from mm to cm sizes. In this paper, we examine the ability of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) to observe dust substructure in a young, planet-forming disc at cm wavelengths. We use dusty hydrodynamics and continuum radiative transfer to predict the distribution and emission of 1 cm dust grains (or pebbles) within the disc, and simulate continuum observations with the current SKA1-MID design baseline at frequencies of 12.5 GHz (Band 5b, ~2.4 cm) on 5-10 au scales. The SKA will provide high-fidelity observations of the cm dust emission substructure in discs for integration times totalling 100's of hours. Radial structure can be obtained at a sufficient resolution and S/N from shorter (10's of hours) integration times by azimuthal averaging in the image plane. By modelling the intensity distribution directly in the visibility plane, it is possible to recover a similar level of (axisymmetric) structural detail from observations with integration times 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than required for high-fidelity imaging. Our results demonstrate that SKA1-MID will provide crucial constraints on the distribution and morphology of the raw material for building planets, the pebbles in protoplanetary discs. ","Observing protoplanetary discs with the Square Kilometre Array -- I.