New discoveries Mysterious Activity Detected in Galaxy M83

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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 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...

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....

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