NARO’s ALMA Clicks Better Than Any Other Telescope

With just half built and 12 working telescope of the assigned 66 Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array's (ALMA) telescope held by National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) pictures of a merging pair of galaxies were released. The high resolution and detailed photographs clearly depicted the telescope’s power to reveal the dark universe.

Antenna galaxy is what the scientists at NRAO are presently more interested in. The test subject for ALMA is an entirely different one of its type. "We chose the impressive interacting system called the Antennae galaxies as a test subject," said Dr. Alison Peck, an astronomer from the NRAO. This is so very exciting because at present these galaxies are undergoing violent merger i.e. mixing up with each other and it is thought that many other galaxies may have undergone this process millions of years ago.
#-Link-Snipped-#
The image is a cluster of views by different telescopes. It clearly distinguishes the inside of the galaxy (In orange and yellow) which otherwise would have looked like a dust cloud. The image shows the collision of two galaxies full of stars and other cosmic bodies. ALMA’s 39 and 23 foot dish antennas can clearly visualize and resolve areas of dense cold gases that other telescope could not detect. With ALMA’s observation cycle called Early Science scientists hope to dwell deeper into Antenna’s core.

What actually is an Antenna galaxy? Initially there is nothing like interacting stars and galaxies. Each galaxy has its own dense center and there is no link between two of them. Now in a spiral galaxy the central black hole hold up all the dense matter and gases. W3hen such two spiral galaxies come too close to each other, their center starts attracting reach other, gases and stars from the outer disk lags behind. Gradually when the galaxy collides with each other it forms an antenna galaxy and the gases and stars collide to form new stars. This is what makes them so very exciting.
By 2013 ALMA’s all 66 telescope will be functional and the whole system will be handled by a special purpose super computer.  With its full power ALMA could be the next one to turn in the secrets of universe.
#-Link-Snipped-#
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership between Europe, Japan and North America in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in Europe by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), in Japan by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) in cooperation with the Academia Sinica in Taiwan and in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC). ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of Japan by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI).

Source: #-Link-Snipped-#, #-Link-Snipped-#

Replies

You are reading an archived discussion.

Related Posts

Research paper published in the magazine SCIENCE reveals the long hard work of researchers and scientists towards the production of plastics. This new technique devised by research team from University...
The Muzee Cloudia is a portable media device with a 7 inch 800 x 480 pixel LCD display. It uses Google Android as the OS. The device can connect to...
Okay, we know you were disappointed by Apple yesterday. First of all they didn't name their new phone as iPhone 5 and then didn't offer anything 'exciting' with iPhone 4S....
Yahoo just revamped its online video site called Yahoo Screen. The makeover makes it looks a lot like Hulu. Yahoo Screen will puts all of the videos that...
Finally, the much awaited tablet, that Kapil Sibal promised, has been launched as 'Akash' for $60 (~Rs. 3000) in India. Akash tablet has been jointly developed by India along with...