ALMA Reveals High-Resolution Structure of Old Star
ALMA, a big telescope, looked at an old star and saw it really well. The star has a ring of gas around it, and some of the gas is moving away into space. Using this powerful telescope in the future will help us understand not only how stars end but also how planets start forming around them.
A Big Telescope
ALMA a big telescope made up of many antennas working together to look at things in space. How well it sees small details depends on how far apart the antennas are and the radio waves’ frequency it observes. In this study, a team of astronomers from different countries used ALMA with its antennas 16 kilometers apart and high-frequency receivers to get the clearest view. They also used a special technique called “band-to-band” to fix changes in Earth’s atmosphere above the antennas. This technique tested in the 1990s for future telescopes at the Nobeyama Radio Observatory.
Special Technique
The scientists picked a star called R Leporis, which is almost at the end of its life and is about 1,535 light-years away from us. They used a special technique to look at this star really closely, like seeing a single human hair from two and a half miles away. What they saw were details on the star’s surface and a ring of gas around it. They also found out that some gas from the star is moving away into space around it.
Strong Telescope
Now that we can use this strong telescope to see things really well, we can look at young stars with disks where planets form. By looking closely, we will learn more about how planets, especially ones like Earth, form.
The JWST and ALMA
In summary, while the James Webb Space Telescope focuses on observing in the infrared spectrum from space, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array observes at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths from the ground. They complement each other in studying different aspects of the universe, such as the formation of celestial bodies and the exploration of distant galaxies and exoplanets.
Read the Original Article: ScienceDaily
