High on the desolate Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Andes.
One of the harshest environments on Earth.
Amid volcanoes, desert plains, and bitter winds.
ALMA Ñ the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array Ñ is ready.
Astronomers and scientists all over the globe have been eagerly anticipating this moment
for decades.
ALMA is the worldÕs largest astronomical project.
But it is not a conventional telescope.
Instead of collecting and analyzing visible light it looks in a different and largely
unmapped part of the spectrum.
By opening a new window on the cosmos, ALMA explores one of the last frontiers of astronomy
Ñ the cold and distant Universe.
All in search of answers to some of the deepest questions about our cosmic origins.
How do stars and planets form?
How did the first galaxies form?
Sixty-six state-of-the-art antennas observe the Universe at millimeter and submillimeter
wavelengths Ñ one thousand times longer than visible wavelengths.
This light reaches us from some of the coldest and most distant objects in the Universe.
Water vapor in the atmosphere blocks these faint whispers from the hidden Universe, so
to collect them we have to go to an extremely high and dry site Ñ like Chajnantor.
The 66 antennas on the high plateau are a critical part of ALMA.
Their big dishes collect the faint millimeter waves from space.
These antennas are truly the state-of-the-art.
Their surfaces are accurate to much less than the thickness of a sheet of paper.
They can move precisely enough to pick out a golf ball at a distance of 15 kilometers.
In a truly global endeavor, the antenna components were constructed in several locations around
the world, sent to Chile to be assembled.
Detectors in each antenna register the finest nuances of the faint signals collected by
the dishes.
These detectors are the most sensitive of their kind and are cooled using helium gas
to just four degrees above absolute zero.
Millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths give astronomers a unique window on the Universe.
But to see them with the sharpness astronomers need, a single-dish telescope would have to
be kilometers across (and impossible to build)!
Instead, ALMA uses 66 separate antennas which can be spread out over the plain with separations
of up to 16 kilometers.
The antennas are linked and their signals combined.
The result: one giant telescope as wide as the whole array, observing with unprecedented
sensitivity and resolution.
Even before the construction stage was complete, the first scientific observations began with
a partial array of antennas.
ALMA had opened its eyes!
Thousands of scientists from around the world competed to be among the lucky few to use
the facilities first.
Even with just 16 antennas ALMA was already the most powerful telescope of its kind.
The first scientific observations fulfilled everyoneÕs hopes.
The Antennae Galaxies, a pair of colliding galaxies with dramatically distorted shapes.
Visible light can show us the stars in the galaxies, but ALMA reveals the clouds of cold,
dense gas from which new stars are born.
The heart of the distinctive galaxy Centaurus A. ALMA peers through the opaque dust lanes
that obscure its centre.
A view of the nearby star Fomalhaut provides clues as to how planetary systems form and
evolve.
Cosmic dust grains found around a brown dwarf suggest that rocky planets might be even more
common in our Universe than we thought.
Sugar molecules, spotted around a young, Sun-like star for the first time: the building blocks
of life in the right place, at the right time, to be part of new planets forming around the
star.
An unexpected spiral structure in the material around the old star R Sculptorus revealed
the secrets of this dying star.
Vast streams of gas flowing across a gap in the disc of material around a young star.
A key stage in the birth of giant planets, observed for the first time.
Alma's inauguration celebrates its coming of age.
The journey has been a long one.
Alma has grown from an idea to a construction project to a fully operational observatory
and to a truly global scientific partnership.
In the serene and lonely beauty of the Atacama desert, Alma is ready for the future.
By using this marvelous telescope, the world's astronomers will peer deep into the hidden
secrets of the cosmos in search of our cosmic origins.