Telescope described as 'biggest leap since Galileo' will unravel how planets form - and could solve
Telescope described as 'biggest leap since Galileo' will unravel how planets form - and could solve the mystery of where Earth's oceans came from
By Rob Waugh
Last updated at 1:10 AM on 18th February 2012
The world's most expensive ground-based telescope, the $1.3billion ALMA array high in the Chilean Andes, has a new mission - to study how planets like our Earth form.
Together with another huge radio telescope, the Very Large Array (VLA), a collection of 27 antennae in New Mexico, ALMA is delivering the first insights into how planets form from the discs of gas and dust around young stars.
Scientists at ALMA describe the telescope as the biggest leap in the technology since Galileo.
These new 'eyes' will allow us to study, at unprecedented scales, the motion of gas and dust in the disks surrounding young stars, and put our theories of planet formation to the test,’ said David Wilner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
[center]
Desert location: ALMA radio telescope sits in the Chajnantor
plateau, in Chile's Atacama desert, some 1500 km north of Santiago
[/center]
More:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2102564/New-telescopes-described-biggest-leap-Galileo-unravel-mysteries-planets-form.html#ixzz1mm66W8PD
= new reply since forum marked as read