The picture you see at the left side is is one remarkable first picture taken by the new $1.3 billion radio telescope sitting high in the Chilean Andes.The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, shortened to the 'ALMA radio telescope', took a snap of the Antennae Galaxies from South America.
The telescope is now officially open and ready to explore the universe after years of planning and constructing the massive observatory it sits in alongside some of the world’s most complex ground-based telescopes.
North American ALMA project manager at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, Mark McKinnon, told Space.com: We went to one of the most extreme locations on Earth to build the world’s largest array of millimetre/submillimeter telescopes, having a level of technical sophistication that was merely a dream only a decade ago.’
‘This truly is a great occasion.’ The amazing shot of the Antennae Galaxies (otherwise known as NGC 4038 and 4039) shows the pair of interacting galaxies in the constellation Corvus. The galaxies are around 70 million light-years away and were captured by ALMA using two different wavelength ranges.
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