[CANCELLED] ALMA Update – Dr Catherine Walsh

Dr. Walsh and her colleagues make use of a relatively new technology called the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, or ALMA for short, which uses the collective view of multiple powerful telescopes.

“It’s a huge instrument. The way that we do this is instead of just one telescope, which has a particular field of view, we make an array, so many, many telescopes. ALMA is such an array and its got 66 of these different telescopes. You add up all of the collecting area that each telescope has and then the resolution is set by the maximum distance between two antenna. The reason you can see with the resolution you can is because of the size of your pupil. So radio telescopes operate in the same way, but they have many eyes, which gives you a lot more information. So the maximum baseline of ALMA (the maximum distance between radio antenna) gives us very high spatial resolution. Enough that we can see molecules in discs around nearby young stars at about the same resolution as the distance between the planets in the solar system.”

She returns in 2020 to give us an update on her work with the array.