ALMA First Light

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has released it's first light images (seen above) and is now is open for business.  Located in the Atacama desert in Chile, it is in one of the driest regions in the world.  The plateau itself is 5 km above sea level and shielded by the Chilean Coastal Range.  This insures that the desert gets no water.  This is great for submillimeter astronomers, as water vapor is a significant foreground to their measurements.

ALMA itself has been about a decade in the making and is a collaboration between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ).  Currently made of nineteen 12 meter radio telescopes ALMA will continue to expand until it reaches completion in 2013 with 66 telescopes.  This will allow ALMA to reach resolutions 5 times smaller than the Hubble Space Telescope and 10 times better than the Very Large Array (VLA).  This will allow astronomers to get an unprecedented look at the submillimeter sky.  This view will allow us to better understand protostellar formation, planet formation, black hole physics, and starburst galaxies just to name a few.

Speaking of starburst galaxies, the first light image is of the Antennae galaxy which happens to be one.  The Antennae is the result of a major merger of two spiral galaxies of roughly the same size.  The image shows the famous Hubble image in blue with the ALMA image in yellow and orange.  The magatama shaped ALMA image shows where the protostars in this starburst galaxy are forming.  These stars are currently buried in their natal clouds and as such are invisible to Hubble due to extinction.  However, ALMA reveals these regions allowing us to probe the locations of star formation themselves, before the stars that form blow away all the surrounding gas and dust.