Welcome to ALMA and the European ALMA Regional Centre!

ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) is the world's largest ground-based facility for observations in the millimeter/submillimeter regime located on the Chajnantor plateau, 5000 meters altitude in northern Chile. It enables transformational research into the physics of the cold Universe, probes the first stars and galaxies, and directly images the formation of planets. ALMA comprises a giant array of fifty 12-m antennas, which can be configured to achieve baselines up to 16 km. It is equipped with state-of-the-art receivers that cover all the atmospheric windows up to 1 THz. In addition, a compact array of 7-m and 12-m antennas greatly enhance ALMA's ability to image extended sources.

The European ALMA Regional Centre (ARC) provides the interface between the ALMA project and the European science community. It supports its users mainly in the areas of proposal preparation, observation preparation, data reduction, and data analysis.

Below you can read the latest Announcements from the European ARC Network.. More details and up-to-date information can be found in the News section and the ALMA Science Portal.

Upcoming workshop "The promises and challenges of the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade" - Deadline for abstract submission: 1 March 2024

Published: 27 Feb 2024

This is a reminder that the deadline for abstract submission [https://www.eso.org/sci/meetings/2024/wsu/abstract/submission-open.html] for contributed talks on the 1st of March 2024 is approaching.  

As previously announced, the workshop 'The promise and challenges of the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade' will take place at ESO - Garching from the 24th to the 28th of June, 2024. This upgrade constitutes the top priority of the ALMA 2030 roadmap. It consists of an increase of the instantaneous spectral bandwidth by as much as a factor of four, while retaining full spectral resolution over the entire bandwidth, thus resulting in increases of the spectral scan speed up to a factor of 50 for the highest spectral resolution. In addition, an upgrade of the full signal chain of ALMA — from the receivers and digitizers, all the way through to the correlated data — will result in increases in sensitivity for all observations. A description of the WSU technical capabilities and the science case motivating the upgrade and is available at Carpenter et al. 2022 [https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.00195].

German ALMA Community Day 2024

Published: 26 Feb 2024

The next Call for Proposals for observing time with ALMA (Cycle 11) will be issued in late March 2023. The deadline for proposals is expected to be on 25 April 2024, with observations starting in October 2024. As a kick-off into the proposal preparation season, the German ARC node cordially invites its community to gather for the German ALMA Community Day in Bonn on 25 March 2024.

Over one third of all ALMA publications now make use of data from the ALMA Science Archive

Published: 26 Feb 2024

Over the past 10 observational cycles, the ALMA Science Archive (ASA) has amassed an enormous volume of data. This extensive collection stands as a promising resource to the continual growth of archival science. With over 1.8PB of accumulated data and nearly 70,000 observations, the ASA now boasts extensive sky coverage in capturing a vast number of research topics (Fig. 1), offering researchers unparalleled opportunities for archival science. The worldwide astronomy community has an ever-growing opportunity to leverage ALMA's extensive archive for their research. Notably, 13% of all publications in Nature involve the use of archival data, with 9% relying exclusively on such data.

Job Advertisement: Head of the European ALMA Regional Centre

Published: 25 Feb 2024

As we celebrate 10 years since the inauguration of ALMA we are looking for the next Head of the European ALMA Regional Centre (ARC) to build upon our catalogue of success. You will be the face of ALMA Science Operations in Europe and be an active member of the ALMA global middle management team. With significant challenges in 2024 and beyond you will also play an integral role in the planning for the Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU) and helping to drive the strategy for the ESO ALMA Support Centre Division. You will be key in ALMA's continuing success.

Job Advertisement: Positions at IRAM

Published: 25 Feb 2024

IRAM would like to draw your attention to the three open positions of the astronomy group amongst which two are fixed-term to permanent & permanent.

All three astronomy job offers are on-line on the IRAM web and AAS Job Register.

Quick Links