ALMA may be the mother of all telescopes, but it’s not the massively long tube you might imagine (sadly no need for a Mendlesohn-du-jour to house it in a suitable Einstein Tower-type visionary form).
Instead, this telescope — full name Atacama Large Millimetre Array — constructs images by combining radio waves beaming in from deep space, picked up on a series of antennas.
Resulting from an unusual transnational initiative between Europe, North America, East Asia and Chile, ALMA will eventually have 66 antennas — mostly 12 metres in diameter — combining to create images of the accuracy possible with a single 14-kilometre-wide one.
To minimize atmospheric interference, ALMA’s site is as high and dry as possible: 5,000 meters up on the Chajnantor Plateau, situated in the parched rain-shadow between the Chilean Coastal range and High Andes: the driest place on earth.
Each antenna can be moved between 150 metres and 16 kilometres, so this crowd of discs communes with the stars in slow-dance formation, their choreographed nodes forming a single vast virtual instrument. Tracking through infinite deep space, they pick up news of star-births and galaxy-sized gas clouds — perhaps discovering even that the universe is not desert(ed) after all….
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