ALMA’s solitude

This panoramic view of the Chajnantor Plateau shows the site of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), taken from near the peak of Cerro Chico. Babak Tafreshi, an ESO Photo Ambassador, has succeeded in capturing the feeling of solitude experienced at the ALMA site, 5000 metres above sea level in the Chilean Andes. Light and shadow paint the landscape, enhancing the otherworldly appearance of the terrain. In the foreground of the image, clustered ALMA antennas look like a crowd of strange, robotic visitors to the plateau. When the telescope is completed in 2013, there will be a total of 66 such antennas in the array, operating together.

ALMA is already revolutionising how astronomers study the Universe at millimetre and submillimetre wavelengths. Even with a partial array of antennas, ALMA is more powerful than any previous telescope at these wavelengths, giving astronomers an unprecedented capability to study the cool Universe — molecular gas and dust as well as the relic radiation of the Big Bang. ALMA studies the building blocks of stars, planetary systems, galaxies, and life itself. By providing scientists with detailed images of stars and planets being born in gas clouds near the Solar System, and detecting distant galaxies forming at the edge of the observable Universe, which we see as they were roughly ten billion years ago, it will let astronomers address some of the deepest questions of our cosmic origins.

ALMA, an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.