New discoveries ALMA studies ‘pregnant’ clouds in the Milky Way

Welcome to the ALMA website for kids!

Discover the world's largest observatory with Talma and Mathias

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Is ALMA a telescope?

Did you ever try to count the stars in the sky? It’s almost impossible – there’s just too many of them! On a clear, dark night, you can see thousands of stars. Too much to count. Sometimes, you can also see the Milky Way as a faint band of...

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New discoveries

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ALMA carries out large census of ‘star factories’ in other galaxies

Not all families are the same. Some have many children; others just a few. In some cases, families live close together in their home town; in other towns they are less numerous, and they live further apart. You might wonder about the cause of all these differences – maybe...

Ring-like galaxy is actually a distant twin of the Milky Way

Have you ever seen a galaxy that looks like a wedding ring? This image, obtained by ALMA, shows a galaxy known as SPT 0418-47. It is extremely far away: thegalaxy’s light took 12.4 billion years to reach Earth. According to the astronomers who took theimage, it looks very much...

ALMA maps organic molecules in the ‘coma’ of comet Wirtanen

A bright comet passed by the Earth in December, and ALMA has studied it in detail. On December 16, comet Wirtanen came as close as 11.4 million kilometers. That’s about thirty times as far as the moon – pretty close for a comet. Around that time, the comet was...

Sizing up Antares

So you thought the Sun is big? True, the Sun’s diameter is more than one hundred times as large as the diameter of the Earth.Pretty big. But some stars in our Milky Way galaxy are much larger. Using ALMA and radio telescopesin the USA, astronomers have now measured the...

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