Latest Submillimeter Array Stories

Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy An international team of astronomers, including researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and from the University of Cologne, discovered two titanium oxides, TiO and TiO2, at radio wavelengths using telescope arrays in the USA and in France. The detection was made in the environment of VY Canis Majoris, a giant star close to the end of its life. The discovery was made in the course of a study of a spectacular star, VY Canis...

[ Watch the Video: Slicing Through View of the Material Around R Sculptoris ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have discovered an unexpected spiral structure in the material around an old star called R Sculptoris The team used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to discover the surprising spiral structure in the gas around the red giant star, which could mean there is a previously unseen companion star orbiting the star....

[ Watch Video 1 ] | [ Watch Video 2 ] | Watch Video 3 ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have made a crucial step towards a scientific goal by observing the heart of a distant quasar with angular resolution. An international team of astronomers connected radio telescopes in Chile, Hawaii and Arizona for the first time using the technique of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), enabling them to make the sharpest observation ever of the center of a...

Using an array of radio telescopes, researchers from Europe and Japan have discovered a submillimeter galaxy -- a type of galaxy that has intense star formation activity and is covered by large amounts of dust -- located approximately 12.4 billion light-years away. The international team of experts, which was led by Kyoto University Associate Professor Tohru Nagao, used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in southern Chile to locate the galaxy, the researchers announced...

A new image of the center of the distinctive galaxy Centaurus A, made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), shows how the new telescope, which is still under construction, allows astronomers to see with unprecedented quality through the opaque dust lanes that obscure the galaxy's center. Centaurus A is a massive elliptical radio galaxy (a galaxy that emits strong radio waves) and is the most prominent, as well as the nearest, radio galaxy in the sky. Its very...

  The ultimate in high altitude, high-tech catering has arrived in Chile to serve chilled "provisions" to the telescopes at the largest astronomical complex in the world, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Until now, servicing the state-of-the-art superconducting receivers inside an ALMA telescope has required hauling the entire 115-ton telescope from its observing site at 16,500 feet down to a support facility at 9,500 feet. The dangerous 40-mile roundtrip, atop...

A team of astronomers and engineers at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have made the first interferometric measurements of radio signals "” so-called "fringes" "” of an astronomical source from the observatory's 5000-meter "high site" of Chajnantor. This is an important technical step for ALMA, as it used a full suite of the production equipment, including two of the 12-meter diameter antennas, and sophisticated electronic systems for receiving and correlating the...

The ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) astronomical observatory took another step forward and upward, as one of its state-of-the-art antennas was carried for the first time to Chile's 16,500-foot-high plateau of Chajnantor on the back of a giant, custom-built transporter. The 40-foot-diameter antenna, weighing about 100 tons, was moved to ALMA's high-altitude Array Operations Site, where the extremely dry and rarefied air is ideal for observing the Universe.The conditions at...

Astronomers have unveiled an unprecedented new atlas of the inner regions of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, peppered with thousands of previously undiscovered dense knots of cold cosmic dust "” the potential birthplaces of new stars. Made using observations from the APEX telescope in Chile, this survey is the largest map of cold dust so far, and will prove an invaluable map for observations made with the forthcoming ALMA telescope, as well as the recently launched ESA Herschel space...

Astronomers are announcing today that a sequence of images collected with the Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA) clearly reveals the presence of a rotating molecular disk orbiting the young binary star system V4046 Sagittarii. The SMA images provide an unusually vivid snapshot of the process of formation of giant planets, comets, and Pluto-like bodies. The results also confirm that such objects may just as easily form around double stars as around single stars like our Sun.These findings...