ALMA Telescope

ALMA Telescope Latest News

Recently, astronomers have captured the central region of our Milky Way and unveiled a complex network of filaments of cosmic gas in unprecedented detail with the help of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope..

About ALMA Telescope

• Location: The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is a radio telescope located in the Atacama Desert in Chile.
• It is a state-of-the-art radio-telescope that studies celestial objects at millimetre and submillimetre wavelengths.
• It has been fully functional since 2013.
• It was designed, planned and constructed by the US’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

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Properties of ALMA Telescope

• It also has extraordinary sensitivity, which allows it to detect even extremely faint radio signals.
• It consists of 66 high-precision antennas, spread over a distance of up to 16 km in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile.
• These antennas can be moved closer together or farther apart for different perspectives – like the zoom lens of a camera.

Also Read: ALMA Telescope: Soon it will get a ‘new brain’

Major Discoveries of ALMA Telescope

• In 2013 it discovered starburst galaxies earlier in the universe’s history than they were previously thought to have existed.
• It provided detailed images of the protoplanetary disc surrounding HL Tauri — a very young T Tauri star in the constellation Taurus, approximately 450 light years from Earth.
• It helped scientists observe a phenomenon known as the Einstein ring.
  • The Einstein ring occurs when light from a galaxy or star passes by a massive object en route to the Earth, in extraordinary detail.

Source: Phy.Org