The newest big thing in radio astronomy

High in Chile’s otherworldly Atacama Desert, the 66-antenna Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array catches radio waves that remain hidden from other telescopes.

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Tau.Neutrino said:

The newest big thing in radio astronomy

High in Chile’s otherworldly Atacama Desert, the 66-antenna Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array catches radio waves that remain hidden from other telescopes.

more….

Excellent article, well worth reading. Starting in 2013 doesn’t make it all that new, but has allowed all these fantastic results.

I like everything about this telescope, particularly the startling construction accuracy that allows observations up to the terahertz band. Parkes is limited to a maximum of 22 GHz for example, and that’s considered high frequency for a radio telescope.

22 GHz is less than the minimum frequency received by ALMA (min 31 GHz) and its maximum frequency is 950 GHz.

The only radio telescope I know of that gets to a higher frequency than that is the High Elevation Antarctic Terahertz telescope with a frequency range of 0.5 to 2 Terahertz. But that only has a diameter of 0.6 m, as against an effective diameter for ALMA of up to 16,000 metres. Giving ALMA up to 25,000 times better resolution.