ALMA is officially going online

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) will be officially inaugurated today.

Created via an international partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile, ALMA is the largest astronomical project in existence. ALMA is currently composed of 66 high precision antennas tat are located on the Chajnantor plateau, 5000 meters altitude in northern Chile which are working together to form one single telescope of so far unmatched resolution.

To celebrate the inauguration, a live video stream of the events will be webcast from the observatory’s Operations Support Facility, at an altitude of 2900 meters in the Chilean Andes. It will run today at 13 March 2013 from 14:30 UT to around 16:00 UT.

The stream will be available at http://www.almaobservatory.org/inauguration/

Info: http://www.almaobservatory.org/

Beat me to it

Would be one of the greatest scientific achievements if it functions as well as it should.

How ALMA works

In theory, the basic notion of interferometry is quite simple. A signal from the sky is captured by two or more antennas which are combined in order to analyze the signal and thus obtain information about its source (whether a star, a planet, or a galaxy). By combining the radio waves collected by several antennas is possible to construct images. Such images are comparable to those that would be obtained with an hypothetical giant telescope or antenna, 14,000 meters in diameter. Since constructing and operating an antenna that size is technically impossible (at least with current technologies), constructing several small antennas and using them combining their output is far more feasible.

I just watched the inauguration ceremony on the stream - it was very interesting when the scientists talked a bit about their work. When the politicians showed up to give there usual blabla it got a bit boring, though.

Although I found it interesting what one Japanese guy told - originally there were three separate groups - one from Japan, one from North America and one from Europe who had sort of the same idea with a somewhat smaller version of ALMA, but who originally competed hard to set up such a telescope themselves, until they decided it might be more worthwhile to pool the energy and money and better create one even bigger telescope that would benefit all. ^^

Yea i read that on their website

Although i find it funny that such advanced structure will still use the simple basic Analogue to digital converter

What is this? A TV aerial?

Yohan Modric wrote:What is this? A TV aerial?

Philistine!