016 – Radio Astronomy and the ALMA Telescope

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This episode is a discussion about radio astronomy and the ALMA observatory with ESO’s Robert Laing, the European instrument scientist for ALMA. The episode has three parts. The first part talks about the science of radio astronomy: current challenges and physical basics. The second part adresses how observing with radio astronomy actually works: the principles behind telescopes and how they are built and operated. Part three then looks at the ALMA observatory specifically, a new, large sub-millimeter radio interferometer currently built in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

• ESO, the European Southern Observatory
• The ALMA Observatory
• Wikipedia on ALMA
• The Very Large Array in New Mexico, USA
• Wikipedia on Radio Astronomy
• Wikipedia on Radio Telescopes
• Wikipedia on Interferometry
• Astronomycast, *the* podcast on astronomy (episodes on interferometry and submillimeter astronomy)