Press Release

“Taiwan and Japan Working Together On the World Largest Ground Based Radio Telescope”

The Director General of The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), Professor Shoken Miyama, and the ALMA-Japan project director, Professor Masato Ishiguro are meeting with President Yuan Lee of Academia Sinica to promote continued collaboration between Japan and Taiwan on the ALMA and various other astronomical projects.

Taiwan joins the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) project, the largest ground based, international astronomical observational facility ever built.It is currently under construction in the Chajnantor area in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, at an altitude of 5000m above sea level.ALMA is designed to cover the wavelength range from 0.3mm to 9mm with an angular resolution of up to 0.004”.This is ten times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope at optical wavelengths. ALMA will study a broad range of exciting science, such as weather patterns on solar system planets, the formation of planets and stars in our galaxy, the motions within active galactic nuclei, and the formation of the earliest galaxies at a redshift of z~10, which is more than 90% of the way back to the very origin of the universe.

ALMA consists of two arrays of precision parabola antennas.Two major international teams, led in North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and in Europe by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), are responsible for constructing the “12-m Array” with up to 64 12-m antennas.A third team led by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) is responsible for constructing the “Atacama Compact Array” with four 12-m antennas and twelve 7-m antennas (ALMA-Japan project).The 12-m Array will be reconfigurable:from the smallest configuration with a size of 150m, to the most extended configuration with a size of 18km.The Atacama Compact Array will fill in even shorter baselines with its 7-m telescopes. All the ALMA antennas in both arrays are equipped with receivers with seven frequency bands, four of which are developed by Europe and North America, and three by Japan.The receivers will make use of the superconducting junction devices cooled down to an absolute temperature of 4 degrees Kelvin. Powerful correlators will process the signal received by the antennas, sampling the continuum emission as well as the many spectral lines simultaneously.The 12-m Array and the Atacama Compact Array will be operated jointly by the ALMA Observatory, and the data from them will be combined to make precise images of astronomical objects.ALMA will be enormously sensitive, and perhaps more than 10,000 times faster than any existing instrument at this wavelength band.

In September 2005, the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan entered into an agreement with the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) in Japan in order to join the ALMA-Japan project. AS will invest ~16 M USD to the project, which is approximately 5% of NINS’s investment, and as a return, researchers in Taiwan will have full access to ALMA on an equal basis as scientists in Japan. The Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA) has been in negotiation with NAOJ regarding contents of Taiwanese contribution to the ALMA-Japan project, and we are in agreement to construct a Front End Integration Center (FEIC) in Taiwan in order to integrate and evaluate all the receiver front end systems for the Atacama Compact Array, which Japan is responsible for. In addition to the FEIC, ASIAA is working on the highest frequency (950 GHz) receiver band with NAOJ, and is also participating in the ALMA software effort in Germany and the US.

In order to cooperate and construct powerful and cutting-edge astronomical instruments in East Asia, The Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics of Academia Sinica also entered an agreement with The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, The Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, The National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences to organize The East Asia Core Observatories Association (EACOA) during September 2005.