ALL ABOUT ALMA

A very large collection

ALMA is made up of 66 dishes, all up to 12 metres (39 feet) across and weighing in at 100 tonnes each. The dishes that comprise ALMA gather faint radio waves from space.

Going digital

ALMA’s dishes are able to turn the incoming signals from analogue into digital by converting the radio waves into binary computer code.

Supercomputer power

The digital data is sent along 15 kilometres (9.3 miles) of optical fibres to a supercomputer whose power matches that of 3 million laptops.

Dished out

When astronomers around the world get the data, they’re able to turn it into images that are ten times sharper than those taken by Hubble.