World’s Most Complex Radio Telescope Snaps Stunning 1st Photo of the Cosmos

SPACE.com Staff After years of planning, construction and assembly, a gigantic observatory billed as the world's most complex array of ground-based telescopes has opened its eyes in South America and captured its first image.

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The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, is now officially open for business high in the Chilean Andes. The huge $1.3 billion radio telescope, a collaboration of many nations and institutions, should help astronomers explore some of the coldest and most distant objects in the universe, researchers said. "We went to one of the most extreme locations on Earth to build the world's largest array of millimeter/sub-millimeter telescopes having a level of technical sophistication that was merely a dream only a decade ago," said Mark McKinnon, North American ALMA project manager at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va., in a statement. "This truly is a great occasion!" [See the first photo and video from the ALMA radio observatory] More...

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