First light for ALMA

After a decade of painstaking engineering and construction, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is now open for business.

ALMA is a collection of (currently) 19 telescopes, each 12 meters across, that can detect light that is between the radio and infrared parts of the spectrum. All sorts of interesting objects emit this kind of light, including solar systems in the process of forming, very distant galaxies nearly at the very edge of the visible Universe, and warm gas and dust from star birth.

In fact, ALMA released an image of that latter type of thing, and it’s pretty nifty:

That’s a close up of the Antennae Galaxies, one of my favorite objects in the whole sky. This is what used to be two separate spiral galaxies like our Milky Way. A few hundred million years ago they collided, and are still in the process of merging. As they do so, vast clouds of gas slam into each other, collapse, and form stars. We get a pretty good view using visible light, but ALMA can penetrate the thick dust and see what’s going on inside those clouds, and does so in detail and resolution we literally could not get in the past. In that image, blue is visible light from Hubble, and orange and yellow is from ALMA, showing where stars are currently being born.

Read More: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/10/03/first-light-for-alma/