ALMA - SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
News: ALMA’s
new brain: Chile telescope will produce even better images of universe
What's in the news?
● The
Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre
Array (ALMA) - a radio telescope comprising 66 antennas located in the
Atacama Desert of northern Chile is set to get software and hardware upgrades.
Key takeaways:
● It
will help to collect much more data and produce sharper images than ever
before.
● It
added that the upgrades would take around five years to finish and cost $37
million.
● The
most significant modernization made to ALMA will be the replacement of its
correlator, a supercomputer that
combines the input from individual antennas and allows astronomers to produce
highly detailed images of celestial objects.
ALMA:
● ALMA
is a state-of-the-art telescope that studies celestial objects at millimeter
and submillimetre wavelengths.
● Today,
ALMA’s correlators are among the world’s
fastest supercomputers. Over the next 10 years, the upgrade will double and
eventually quadruple their overall observing speed.
Location: Atacama Desert, Chile.
Features:
● The
telescope consists of 66 high-precision antennas, spread over a distance of up
to 16 km.
● They
can penetrate through dust clouds and help astronomers examine dim and distant galaxies and stars out there.
● It
also has extraordinary sensitivity,
which allows it to detect even extremely faint radio signals.
Collaboration:
● Partnership
among the United States, 16 countries in
Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Chile.
Why is ALMA located in Chile’s Atacama Desert?
● ALMA
is situated at an altitude of 16,570 feet (5,050 meters) above sea level on the
Chajnantor plateau in Chile’s Atacama Desert as the millimetre and
submillimetre waves observed by it are very susceptible to atmospheric water
vapour absorption on Earth.
● Moreover,
the desert is the driest place in the world, meaning most of the nights here
are clear of clouds and free of
light-distorting moisture - making it a perfect location for examining the
universe.
Notable discoveries made by ALMA:
● With
ALMA’s capability of capturing high-resolution
images of gas and dust from which stars and planets are formed and
materials that could be building blocks of life, scientists are trying to find
answers to age-old questions of our cosmic origins.
● It
discovered starburst galaxies
earlier in the universe’s history than they were previously thought to have
existed.
● Next
year, ALMA 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 and
“transformed the previously accepted theories about the planetary formation”.
● In
2015, the telescope helped scientists observe a phenomenon known as the Einstein ring, which occurs when light
from a galaxy or star passes by a massive object en route to the Earth, in
extraordinary detail.