Come out to Jack Fields elementary school for our September meeting on September 27!
Our featured speaker will be Ryan Loomis and his topic is A Decade of ALMA and the Next Generation of Radio Interferometers. The presentation will begin at 7:30.
But first, at 6:30 Bruce Pollard will present our monthly FYI session – What’s Up This Fall.
See you there and don’t forget to bring your favorite comfy folding chair (if you don’t want to sit at the elementary cafeteria lunch tables)!
Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/
82793969840?pwd= iUy5yzJNabGRuQgY2SQWSMCauirIOd .1
Meeting ID: 827 9396 9840
Passcode: 091516A Decade of ALMA and the Next Generation of Radio Interferometers
In 2011, the Atacama Large (sub)-Millimeter Array reached first light with three key science goals: probing the gas in distant galaxies, uncovering the details of planet formation, and making unprecedentedly sharp radio images. Over the following decade, ALMA has resoundingly achieved those goals and much more, thoroughly revolutionized our understanding of cosmological history, star and planet formation, and even objects in our own Solar System.
In this talk, I review the highlights of ALMA’s scientific discoveries and dive into the technological advances and technique developments that made these discoveries possible. I also discuss the numerous challenges the international partnership behind ALMA has faced – unprecedented construction and operations at 5000m of elevation, international labor relations, the global pandemic, cyberattacks, and more. Overcoming these obstacles and understanding the key drivers behind ALMA’s success has left the radio community well prepared to springboard into the next generation of interferometric instruments, namely the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU) and next generation Very Large Array (ngVLA). In the last portion of the talk, I provide an overview of these exciting new instruments, their upgraded capabilities (both in hardware and software), and the variety of groundbreaking scientific advances that we can look forward to in the coming decades.
