New discoveries Say cheese, black hole – you’re on camera!

Welcome to the ALMA website for kids!

Discover the world's largest observatory with Talma and Mathias

Learn with Talma

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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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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...

Twinkle, twinkle, big black hole

The black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is twinkling. Well, not exactly. The black hole itself doesn’t emit any light, so it can’t twinkle. But due to its huge gravity, the black hole attracts gas from its immediate surroundings. Before the gas plunges into the...

Early disk galaxy found by ALMA is hard to explain

Disk galaxies like our own Milky Way grew faster than most astronomers expected. That’s the surprising conclusion of a new ALMA discovery. After the Big Bang, some 13.8 billion years ago, atoms first clumped together into small, irregular galaxies. These ‘galactic building blocks’ later merged intolarger and larger systems....

ALMA helps discover strange sideways structure in distant black hole jet

Astronomers have obtained the sharpest image ever of the powerful jet of material from a giantblack hole, and they made a surprising discovery.Black holes are regions in space with so much gravity that they gobble up everything in theirneighborhood. Almost all of the gas is falling into the black...

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