Visit the world's largest radio telescope

This great telescope is being built in the driest desert on earth. Through 66 giant parabolic antennae, scientists want to look to the boundaries of space and time.

The astronomical professor de Graauw, 66, is actually retired. Even so he still accepted an invitation to go to Chile. He is currently the temporary director of Atacama Large Millimeter Array (Alma) - the world's largest radio telescope leader in the future. By 2012, 54 parabolic antennae with a diameter of 12 meters and 12 7-meter dish antennae will be installed on the Chajnantor plateau.

The largest toy of the future by radio astronomers lies in a deserted area in the Atacama desert. With reddish brown soil and many rocks scattered all over the place, the scene is similar to those in Mars photos sent by "Spirit" and "Opportunity" . And often the Atacama desert is similarly desolate.

For professionals, this desert is not only a workplace with spectacular scenery, it also brings many hardships. Chajnantor is located at an altitude of 5100 m, the level can endanger the human body. Light dizziness and fatigue are just the slightest effects of oxygen deprivation. Sensitive people may vomit or faint.

The air is thin and empty

The emptiness still dominates the Chajnantor plateau. The main house stood tall, but the rooms in it were still waiting for users. Science only works in a small framework. Until now only a large parabolic antenna was installed on the plateau: Apex - a 12 m pan antenna was one of the first prototypes for Alma's antennas.

Apex telescope on the Chajnantor plateau.(Photo: Spiegel Online)

Thanks to the altitude, the calm and dry atmosphere that the Atacama desert is one of the best places for astronomy research. If tourists here and users of optical telescopes enjoy watching the starry sky very impressive at night, radio astronomers can observe the vestiges of atoms and molecule. Other places on the Earth cannot see them.

Thanks to the Apex telescope, researchers have discovered complex CO and organic molecules from the depths of the universe. They also immediately found many charged molecules containing fluorine - which had never been successful before. All of that has revealed more about how stars and planets like the Earth form.

What makes the scientists startled is that only one antenna has made such discoveries from the Chajnantor plateau, with 66 other Alma dish antennae still able to do anything?

Large telescope 15 km

Huge project in every way. The cost of 800 million euros is assumed by the US, Canada and countries in the European Hemisphere Astronomical Research Organization (ESO). Specialized cars can transport over 100 tons of heavy antennas or place them in a perimeter of only 150 meters when people aim for large areas of the sky.

When observing small individual objects, the antennas can be scattered in a circumference of up to 15 km around the center of the plateau. Thanks to this method, called interference, Alma reaches the resolution of a giant pan 15 km in diameter. This means that if you have a keen eye like Alma, people will still recognize a 5-millionth wide slot at a distance of 100 m.

Alma can observe emission objects 10 times more accurate than the Very Large Array (VLA) glass in the US state of New Mexico. This telescope, partly well known thanks to the "Contact" film , consists of 27 parabolic antennae, each with a diameter of 25 m. Unlike VLA, Alma operates in millimeters and smaller areas of radio astronomy. While VLA analyzes radio waves with wavelengths between 1 cm and 4 m, Alma goes deeper into wavelengths from 9.6 to 0.3 mm.

What do researchers hope for from this new tool

The higher the resolution, the greater the amount of data.

"Am I nervous? Of course," director de Graauw said. "We will have capabilities that no one else has before." Humans will be able to identify the symbols of molecules in the vast universe with an unprecedented precision. The new telescope has a spatial resolution corresponding to the "Hubble" space telescope . "Alma is a combination of the best from optical and radio technology," said de Grauuw.

Some telescopes have been assembled.(Photo: Spiegel Online)

On the way to find molecules

One of the main tasks of this new telescope is to study physicochemical processes when the planet forms and analyze chemical elements in nebulae. The solar nebula is a thousand times larger than our planetary system, which is one of Alma's top goals. Because millimeter waves can easily penetrate clouds of dust and gas that obscure the birth of stars and planets before other telescopes, especially optical telescopes.

On the contrary, Alma is almost impossible to achieve one of astronomy's greatest goals - discovering a second Earth in some planetary system. This achievement must be consistent with the future generation of space telescopes. And finding another planet is also not Alma's task - this is handed over to colleagues of the Seti project or those who operate the Allen-Arrays that are built specifically for this purpose and have begun operating from autumn 2007.

Alma not only looked in the cosmic regions near the Earth. "We also want to know how the first stars of the universe became and how the first galaxies were structured , " de Graauw said. These objects belong to the coldest objects in the universe, glowing in the millimeter region and below the millimeter, their temperature is only a few tenths of absolute zero.

In order to observe these radiation, it is necessary to overcome long distances that are hard to imagine. Alma must see 13 billion light-years deep into the universe to find the light of the first stars - one of the biggest technical challenges, especially for a telescope on Earth.

In spring 2009, the first antennas on the Chajnantor plateau will begin to operate. By the beginning of 2010 it is expected that there will be 16 pan antennas there - "that much has surpassed many astronomical stations , " de Graauw said. The remaining 50 antennas will continue to be installed until 2012.