Giant radio telescope to probe cosmos

ALMA telescope in Chile, comprising 66 antennas, will study the universe at millimetre and submillimetre wavelengths.

A huge new radio telescope system called the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) has been inaugurated in Chile. A project of cooperation between many nations across Europe, North America and East Asia in conjunction with the Republic of Chile, ALMA is located at an altitude of 16,500 feet in the desert of Atacama, Chile. It sits above 40% of the Earth’s atmosphere and virtually all of the world’s water vapour.

ALMA is designed to peer into a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum at millimetre wavelengths - light that is closer to a radio wave than to the optical light that is seen by the human eye.

ALMA comprises 66 antennas that will provide high-resolution images of galaxies that exited in the early years of the universe, as well as the formation processes of planets circling stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. Scientists from around the world will have the opportunity to explore such objects as they never could before, with an array of telescopes more than 100 times more capable than any previous millimetre arrays.

ALMA is expected to reveal extraordinary details of the origins of structures in our universe, extending from planets around nearby stars to the earliest galaxies as they formed more than 12 billion years ago.

As its name implies, ALMA is an array or set of antennas. The main technical challenge for ALMA is to be able to aim simultaneously all the antennas at the same region of the sky, to capture astronomical signals with each antenna, then convert the signal to digital format in order to transmit the signal from each antenna to a central building. There, a supercomputer will combine the signals received at the various antennas to create data suitable for performing a scientific analysis of the properties of the source of the signals, with unprecedented accuracy and quality.