On Firmament Ground: Partially Completed ALMA Radio Telescope Already Generating Discoveries

The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array in the Chilean Andes is the most powerful?and expensive?ground-based observatory yet

By Katie Worth

Dishing the Cosmos: The partially completed Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array radio telescope in the Chilean Andes is already the most powerful ever built. Image: Katie Worth

After a large telescope is constructed, engineers and astronomers often have to spend months or years tinkering before it finally begins contributing to science in earnest.

But last year, with just one quarter of its construction completed, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array radio telescope?the largest, highest-altitude and most expensive ground-based observatory yet?turned its dishy ears to the skies and began to listen. Already it has begun to sing out its discoveries.

Since astronomers began using the $1.3-billion international observatory?called ALMA for short?a year ago, it has revealed a "death spiral" of gas and dust unwinding around a dying red giant star, giving insight into what our sun's demise may look like. The array has provided a clear picture of a nearby planetary system that had eluded even Hubble. It has also detected sugar molecules floating in gas surrounding a star as well as markers for hundreds of other molecules in space?clues that astrophysicists astrochemists are working furiously to decipher.

And those discoveries are just from ALMA's intentional observations. As scientists test the observatory's ever-growing collection of antennas by pointing them at well-studied objects in space, ALMA is happening on details no other instrument has ever captured. Astronomers, for instance, recently tested the array by aiming it at the Antennae Galaxies, a pair of colliding galaxies that scientists have been studying since 1785, and saw with superlative detail its stellar-nurseries, where billions of new stars are being born. Another test found the poisonous molecule ethyl cyanide floating in a star-forming region in the constellation Orion.

"We are discovering things completely by accident," says Violette Impellizzeri, an astronomer on the observatory's Commissioning Team. "It's to the point that we have to be very careful what we look at," because they are stumbling on discoveries that other scientists were hoping for telescope time to investigate.

The observatory's sensitivity will only improve as construction brings more antennas to its array. Unlike optical telescopes, whose power comes from mirrors and lenses gathering light within a single instrument, modern radio telescopes consist of herds of saucers aimed in unison at a patch of sky. The dishes can be moved around in relationship to one another to get the best angle on a distant domain. ?The weak waves detected by each of the dishes are digitally combined to create one strong signal, resulting in a much higher resolution than a single large dish could achieve.

And their aim is exact, says Stefano Stanghellini, antenna project manager for the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which is contributing 25 of ALMA's antennas. A person shooting a gun with the same accuracy would put a bullet through a two-euro coin at a distance of 10 kilometers, he says.

With this exceptional precision and sensitivity, ALMA will look into the darkest and coldest corners of our universe?places where optical telescopes can only grope. For example, a dark cloud surrounding a star may barely be perceived optically, but ALMA can image it in detail, and also determine its composition.

When ALMA first became available to investigators in October 2011, just 16 of its slated 66 antennas were operational, but it already constituted the world's most powerful radio telescope?a distinction that had more than 1,000 scientists salivating for time with it. A lucky 10 percent were selected for ALMA's first research cycle; the second cycle begins in January, with double the number of antennas.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=ace47f9c4c91d958a415cb6ff5a7f506

Kara Alongi Sahara Davenport Resident Evil 6 arnold schwarzenegger pirate bay philadelphia eagles revenge