ALMA at the SSE

ALMA SSE imaging mosaic

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 21:23:18 +0100

A mosaic of all the “interferometered” people and objects at the ALMA Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition stand…

.. nice bunch of people - I can spot myself in there a few times. If came along you might be able to spot yourself!

ALMA observes a ring around the bright star Fomalhaut ALMA...

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 13:17:26 +0100

ALMA observes a ring around the bright star Fomalhaut

ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO). Visible light image: the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

Fauna and flora in the Chilean Chajnantor plain

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 08:56:11 +0100

Although it is an ambitious scientific project activities on the ALMA site not only focus on building the world’s most advanced astronomical observatory but also on the historical and environmental aspects in this unique region.

We have a beautiful, fully illustrated book about the fauna and flora in the Chilean Chajnantor plain that is free to download (PDF file, 6.25MB) that is bilingual Spanish/English.

Our stand in action...

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 08:34:40 +0100

Have you been "interferometered" yet?

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 07:55:17 +0100

If not you should come down to the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition and you can see what you would look like through the eyes of the worlds most power radio telescope.

If you have then take a look at our twitpic feed… as you could have uploaded the result for the whole world to see just like my hand:

— Sam George

Radio galaxy Centaurus A, as seen by ALMA

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 06:38:08 +0100

Venus before the transit..

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 13:13:25 +0100

Venus shortly before it moved in front of the Sun (the famous Venus transit) last month on June 5th. At that stage Venus was not visible through optical telescopes because its dark side was turned towards us. ALMA detects millimeter and submillimeter waves which are given off by the hot atmosphere of Venus (and of course even more strongly by the hot surface of the Sun).

Some ALMA facts..

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 06:40:04 +0100

The Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) is an array of radio telescopes in the Atacama desert of northern Chile.

When ALMA is completed it will consist of:

a giant array of 12-m antennas with baselines up to 16 km
an additional compact array of 7-m and 12-m antennas to greatly enhance ALMA’s ability to image extended targets

This is located on the Chajnantor plateau at 5000m altitude. Initially, it will observe at wavelengths in the range 3 mm to 400 μm (84 to 720 GHz).

The antennas can be moved around, in order to form arrays with different distributions of baseline lengths. More extended arrays will give high spatial resolution, more compact arrays give better sensitivity for extended sources.

Each antenna weighs: 115 tonnes! Moving these around at 5000m is not an easy feat. Two custom 28-wheel self-loading heavy haulers were developed. Each is 10 m wide, 20 m long and 6 m high, weighing 130 tonnes. They are powered by twin 500 kW diesel engines!

— Sam George

Virtual Tour of ALMA

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 13:19:25 +0100

Want to take a tour around ALMA? Well we can offer you a virtual tour of the site without the hassle of having to fly to Chile… ALMA virtual tour.

ALMA in action...

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 06:37:17 +0100

A new window into the Universe has opened with the start of Early Science at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Watch the world’s most complex ground-based telescope in action and get a first look at its unique views of the Universe.

Robust ALMA antennas

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 13:20:50 +0100

The ALMA antennas are designed and built to face very rough conditions. ALMA is located in one of the driest locations on the Earth but very occasionally snow can cover the site…

Live from Chajnantor

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 06:29:31 +0100

The Array Operations Site (AOS) is located at 5,000 meters altitude - a live feed is provided via a webcam.

We are open! Come down and visit us

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 15:33:48 +0100

We are open! Come down and visit us:

summer-science:

Opening times
Tue 3 July 10 am - 9 pm
Wed 4 July 10 am - 5 pm
Thu 5 July 10 am - 5 pm
Fri 6 July 10 am - 9 pm
Sat 7 July 10 am - 9 pm
Sun 8 July 10 am - 6 pm

Note: Last entry is 30 minutes before closing time

Address
6-9 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AG

Public transport

Underground stations: Charing Cross and Piccadilly Circus

Bus routes: 12, 13, 15 and 453.

Coach station: Connections from Victoria coach station

Events
We’re hosting a range of events and family activities in conjunction with the exhibition too! So don’t forget to pop your head in.

Atacama Nightsky

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 15:16:00 +0100

ALMA unveils details of a galaxy far, far away...

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 06:58:32 +0100

ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) scientists have detected a galaxy that is 12.4 billion light-years away! This was detected via looking at the emission line of Nitrogen in the galaxy. At that distance we are looking at a time that is just 1.3 billion years after the big bang. This means that astronomers are able to see if there is any difference between the contents of galaxies not long after the big bang and now. The result of this work shows that the composition was already close to the elemental composition of the present Universe. Thus suggesting that intense star formation activities had occurred in the early Universe.

More on this work can be found in the ALMA press release and if you fancy taking a read you can also freely download the science paper.

— Sam George

Setting up the stand..

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 12:42:00 +0100

… were currently putting the last touches to our Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2012 stand..

(picture by Sarah Graves)

(picture by Adam Avison)

Stand building...

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 08:16:17 +0100

We put the final bits and pieces together for our stand on Friday… lots of heavy lifting and fun with simulators and Frisbees.

5000m in Chile

Sat, 30 Jun 2012 08:59:30 +0100

Sarah Graves

The ALMA telescope is on a plateau at 5000m altitude in Chile — the same height as the Everest base camp. I got to go up to visit the site in May.

Before my trip up, I’d already spent a few days at the ALMA operations site at 2900m. Even this is high enough that you really notice the effect of altitude — carrying my suitcase the short distance into my room the first night there left my heart pumping. However, 5000m is a lot more serious.

The journey starts with a quick trip to the ALMA medical room, to have my heart rate and bloody pressure checked. After I’ve been passed, its time to make sure I’ve got sunscreen and sunglasses — as well as gloves, a wooly hat and a warm jacket. Its pretty cold up on the site on the day I visit, but the high altitude means the sunlight is a lot stronger than it is at ground level, and you want to keep the UV away.

We also make sure we’ve got blood-oxygen monitors and some cans of compressed air. The oxygen levels at 5000m are low enough that you want to keep an eye on your blood-oxygen level and take regular breaths from the oxygen.

The landscape around the site is amazing, and to someone used to a wet and green Britain the dry Chilean mountains look like an alien landscape. This is a view from a peak overlooking some of the more far-flung ALMA antenna pads — you can just see the roads out to the most distant pads in the left. Once its completed, ALMA will have its dishes spread out around the plateau, with up to 16km between them.

Even though I didn’t have to do anything more physically taxing than walk around for a few minutes, I can feel the effect of the low oxygen as I wander around snapping picture. I have to consciously remind myself to keep taking extra deep breaths, as well as occasional breaths from the cans of oxygen we’ve brought. But people have had to build all the telescope infrastructure in these conditions — roads, power lines, antenna pads, buildings, radio masts, weather stations, all had to be constructed or installed at the high site. As well as an amazing scientific instrument, ALMA is also a hugely impressive engineering project, constructed under very difficult conditions.

Below, you can see an overview of the central region of the ALMA site. The individual dishes are spread out over about 2km in this picture. Once the telescopes construction is finsihed, the massive 12m dishes will be moved around the site regularly — averaging about one dish moving every single day.

We drive back down to the 5000m plateau where the ALMA antennas live to take a close up look at them. In the picture below you can see the antennas clustered together from a lot closer up. The building off to the right of the image contains the ALMA correlator. The correlator is where the signal from each of the dishes are combined together to create one much more detailed image. The level of detail we can see is determined by the size of the distances between the individual dishes instead of by the size of a single dish.

And here’s a close up of some of the 12m dishes. ALMA will eventually have 66 dishes, and as of May this year they already had 33 dishes at the 5000m site! The dishes are a mix of 12m dishes and a few 7m dishes. The 7m ones are placed very close together in the centre of the array, and this helps ensure that ALMA can produce more accurate images. Each of the 12m dishes weighs almost 100 tonnes, and the special transporters that move them to and from the different pads has to have a 28-wheel drive!

After this we head back down to the comfort of the ALMA operations site — after a few hours spent at 5000m, the lower site feels far more comfortable than it did in the morning!

"Interferometered" Team

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 17:45:03 +0100

Some of the ALMA SSE team as seen through our interferometry simulator

Scientists having fun with the simulator...

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 22:50:00 +0100

We have finished writing the code (in glorious Python) to get our ALMA demonstrator for the Summer Science Exhibition, so here are a few quick previews….

Here is Adam looking at his best through the eyes of an interferometer:

Note the fake colours, what we are using to make the images is the brightness - then for fun we add the really the garish colour scheme. The redder the brighter. I’m guessing this means that Adam was blushing when he had is photo taken by the webcam :-)

Not looking quite as complete as Adam, probably down to the type of interferometer I made (the more antennas the better), is me:

Can you guess what is on my T-shirt?

John decided to go for the Blue Peter approach, getting out a piece of paper and some Tipp-Ex…

During the exhibition you should take note of our twitpic feed as users will be able to upload their creations for all to see! We hope to see many more interesting images than we have produced so far.

The time is counting down… so see you at the:

The above photo is the exhibition logo as seen through ALMA’s ‘eyes’.

— Sam George