Giant ALMA Telescope’s Amazing Early Discoveries Are Only The Beginning

Giant ALMA Telescope’s Amazing Early Discoveries Are Only The Beginning

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A long, long time ago, massive, super-bright galaxies known as starburst galaxies were churning out new stars at a frantic pace. Astronomers would like to study their frenetic star-formation physics and compare them to the relatively slow star factories of the modern era, but this is very hard to do. Starburst galaxies are shrouded from our best visible-light telescopes, hiding as they are behind thick curtains of dust. Enter the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array.

The ALMA telescope can see them by looking directly at the dust itself. To ALMA, the starburst galaxies are some of the brightest objects in the sky.

As construction on ALMA has progressed, astronomers have been making a few observations with a few sets of radio-dish pairs, including this latest observation, which was published last week in Nature.