The 17-day strike at the world’s largest ground-based observatory ended Saturday, and ALMA's revolutionary observations of the millimeter/submillimeter sky restart today.
Stellar fireworks are what remains of a centuries-old explosion, the concussive consequence of four stars that came together in a gravitational tussle.
As one of the world's greatest new telescopes takes shape, preliminary results impress.
The Chajnantor plateau in Chile's Atacama Desert has an elevation of more than 16,000 feet — harsh conditions for humans, but perfectly suited to the world's greatest array of submillimeter-wave radio telescopes, now under construction.
An ALMA submillimeter-wavelength image unveils the dawn of planet formation around a surprisingly young star in unprecedented detail.
Astronomers have imaged a third star embedded in the spiral disk around a pair of baby stars, the first direct evidence of a process of star formation known as disk fragmentation.
For the first time, astronomers have imaged a key stage in planet formation, witnessing the gas streams that signal two gas giant planets sweeping up material around a star.
The future is now — the world’s most powerful radio telescope array was inaugurated yesterday.
ALMA, the largest telescope array in the world, took a look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, and revealed the cosmic history of star formation.
High in the Chilean Andes, at the nosebleed altitude of 16,400 feet (5,000 m), the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array has begun to probe the depths of the radio universe as never before.
Astronomers using the ALMA array of radio dishes have detected a dwarf galaxy 4 billion light-years away by the pull of its dark matter.
New ALMA observations reveal low levels of dust in nine early galaxies, suggesting astronomers should revise some of their calculations.
Astronomers studying the infrared glow that pervades the universe have pinned down its source: dusty, faint, and faraway galaxies.
In the November 2013 issue of S&T, I write about a revolutionary new telescope being built in the Chilean Atacama Desert. The Atacama Large Millimiter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) explores a little-known region of the electromagnetic spectrum, waves that are longer than the farthest infrared but shorter than radio waves. Submillimeter/millimeter waves come from frigid gas just…
Astronomers have released the first new science results from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a still-under-construction network of 66 antennas in northern Chile. The new observations suggest the contentious Fomalhaut star system may have two small planets shepherding its gigantic ring.
A rare type of gravitational lens offers astronomers a close look at a young, dusty galaxy manufacturing hundreds of stars a year.
When astronomers went searching for the planets that must exist around HL Tau, they came up empty — and future searches may not fare much better.
High-mass stars may outshine and outweigh the Sun, but observations show all stars may have had a similar beginning.
A new method of measuring star formation in the earliest galaxies finds that they’re producing more massive stars than expected — a result that could affect our understanding of how galaxies grow their stars.
Combining a novel technique and a world-class telescope, astronomers have measured the mass of the supermassive black hole at the center of barred spiral NGC 1097.