The Noema1 radio telescope installed in the French Alps has just reached full capacity, making it the most powerful millimeter radio telescope in the northern hemisphere. It is the result of a collaboration between the CNRS (The National Center for Scientific Research, better known by its acronym CNRS, is the largest…), the Max Planck Society (MPG, Germany) and the Instituto Geográfico Nacional ( IGN , Spain). Built and managed by the Institut de radioastronomie millimètre (The Institut de radioastronomie millimètre or Iram was founded in 1979. It is the result…) (Iram) and already at the origin of significant discoveries, Noema is now poised to make unprecedented observations.
The Noema Observatory, equipped with a network of twelve radio antennas.
© Jérémie BOISSIER/IRAM/CNRS PHOTO LIBRARY
Eight years after the inauguration of his first antenna (In radioelectricity, an antenna is a device that makes it possible to radiate (transmitter) or …) in 2014, this project (A project is an irrevocable commitment with uncertain outcome, not reproducible with .. .) Main subject is now complete. With twelve 15-meter antennas that can be moved at distances of up to 1.7 kilometers (The meter (symbol m, from the Greek metron, measure) is the system’s basic unit of length…), Noema is a new tool ( A tool is a finished object used by a living being for the purpose of its…) unique to research (Scientific research primarily denotes any action taken to…) in astronomy (astronomy is the science of observing the stars, searching for explanations…). Its resolving power (In optics, the resolving power of an optical system is its ability to discriminate…) as well as the sensitivity of the grating allows scientists to collect light (light is the amount of electromagnetic waves visible to the eye…) up to 13 Billions of years have traveled to reach Earth (Earth is the third planet in the solar system in order of distance…).
It is the culmination of more than 40 years of European scientific collaboration. Founded in 1979 by the French CNRS and the German MPG, Iram joined the Spanish IGN in 1990. Iram is a world leader in millimeter radio astronomy2 and Noema is its pre-eminent instrument today. It is now the most powerful millimeter radio telescope (a radio telescope is a special telescope used in radio astronomy) in the northern hemisphere (north is a cardinal point, the opposite of south).
Noema’s antennas are equipped with very highly sensitive receivers that are close to the quantum limit. They work in a network using a technique called interferometry (interferometry is a measurement method that exploits the interference that occurs between…): After all the antennas have been pointed to the same area of space, the received signals are combined thanks to a supercomputer (A computer is a machine equipped with a processing unit that makes this possible…) and its resolving power is then that of a giant telescope (A telescope, (from Greek tele means “far” and skopein means…) have the same diameter (In a circle or sphere, the diameter is a line segment going through the center…) as if it contained them all.
By modifying the configuration of the antennas, astronomers can “zoom in” on a celestial object (A star or celestial object is an object of the universe. access rules and…) to observe its details. The configurations can extend over distances from a few hundred meters to 1.7 km today, and the network thus functions like a camera (The term camera comes from the Latin: chamber, for photographic chamber. It denotes a device… ) with a variable Objective ( In mathematics and logic, a variable is represented by a symbol. It…). The larger the configuration, the stronger the zoom: Noema’s maximum spatial resolution is so high that it could distinguish a portable phone at a distance of more than 500 kilometers.
Equipped with cutting-edge technologies, it is one of the few radio observatories in the world (The word world can denote:) that can measure large numbers simultaneously (The notion of number in linguistics is explained in the article “Number… ) signatures of molecules and atoms (An atom (from Greek ατομος, atomos, “that can’t be…”) – Scientists call this multi-line observations. These new possibilities of observation (Observation is the action of attentive observation of phenomena without the will to them. ..), combined with its high sensitivity and its very high spectral and spatial resolution, make Noema a unique instrument for understanding complexity (complexity is a term used in philosophy, epistemology (of …) interstellar matter (Matter is the substance that makes up every body that has a tangible reality. It is…) and constituent elements of the cosmos.
Spiral galaxy ((see talk page)) IC342 in the constellation (A constellation is a group of stars whose projections onto the vault…) of the giraffe (The giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis) is a species of artiodactyl ungulate mammal…). Noema revealed the presence of gas (A gas is a set of very weakly connected atoms or molecules and…) molecular wholes (The whole, understood as the totality of what exists, is often interpreted as the world or…) along of multiple spirals and filaments, evidence that the galaxy (a galaxy in cosmology is a collection of stars, gas, dust and…) is riddled with intense bursts of star formation.
© IRAM/VLA/Mayall/DSS2/A. Schruba
Noema offers French, German and Spanish scientists privileged access and the opportunity to conduct unprecedented research. Overall (Total is invariably the quality of completeness. From an accounting point of view, one…) Iram supports more than 5,000 researchers from all over the world who conduct their research with Noema. It allows them to study the cold matter of the cosmos, just a few degrees above absolute zero (The number zero (from the Italian zero, derived from the Arabic sifr,…) absolute. With its antennas we can study the formation , composition and dynamics (The word dynamics is often used to denote or qualify what is related to motion. It…) of whole galaxies, but also of stars in formation and at the end of their life (La life is the name, which is given : ), comets or the environment (The environment is everything that surrounds us. It is all the natural elements and…) black holes to solve the most basic fundamentals of modern astronomy.
In addition, Noema is the origin of great discoveries and has already (Les Fournoi Korséon (Greek: Φούρνοι…) provided sensational results. For example, he has observed the most distant galaxy known to date (Le jour where the day is the interval that the sunrise from the sunset separates; it is the…), shortly after the Big Bang (The Big Bang is the dense and hot time experienced by the Universe there…) and recently the temperature (Temperature is a physical quantity measured with a thermometer and…) radiation (radiation, synonymous with radiation in physics, denotes the process of emission or…) the cosmic microwave background (The cosmic microwave background is the name for electromagnetic radiation from…) to a very early period of the universe (The universe is the set of everything that exists and the laws that govern it.), a premiere will allow a follow-up and around the Better limit the effects of dark energy (In cosmology, dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy that fills the entire universe…). Also that year (A year is a unit of time expressing the duration between two occurrences of a related event…) Noema discovered the first example of a black hole (In astrophysics, a black hole is a massive object whose gravitational field is so intense …) is growing rapidly in the dusty core of a starburst galaxy, at a time close to the oldest known supermassive black hole in the Universe. The observatory is also the origin of the latest discoveries of molecules in discs (Autour is the name given by the avian nomenclature in French (updated)…) young stars, true cradles of planet formation ( A planet denotes a mobile mechanical unit that represents the solar system…).
Noema is also part of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) consortium, which released the first image of a black hole in 2019 and that of the black hole at the center of our galaxy in early 2022. It made its first observations for the collaboration in 2021 and then in 2022. With its twelve extremely sensitive antennas, it offers the global EHT network unprecedented spatial resolution and sensitivity. Alongside Iram’s second radio telescope, the 30-metre radio telescope installed in Spain, Noema will enable the EHT to create animations with even more precise detail. The two installations are crucial for EHT collaboration, study and understanding of the physics (physics (from Greek φυσις, nature) is etymologically that…) of black holes.
The observatory will open on September 30, 2022 in the presence of Antoine Petit, President and CEO of the CNRS, Martin Stratmann, President of the MPG, Rafael Bachiller, Director of the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional de l’IGN, Karl Schuster, Director of Iram, Stéphane Guilloteau, Chairman of the Steering Committee (The Steering Committee is a group of people responsible for ensuring the proper functioning of a…) of Iram, and Reinhard Genzel, Nobel Prize in Physics (The Nobel Prize in Physics is a prize administered by the Nobel Foundation, according to. ..) 2020 and member of the Iram Steering Committee.
Two of the twelve antennas of the Noema radio telescope.
© Jeff GRAPHY/IRAM
Remarks:
1 – For NORthern Extended Millimeter Array, “extended millimeter network of the north” in French. The number of Noema antennas has increased from 6 in 2014 to 12 in 2022. The paths to move them have also been lengthened from 760 meters to 1.7 kilometers to be able to spread them further apart.
2 – Millimetric radio astronomy studies light whose wavelength is (The length of an object is the distance between its two extreme ends…) (A wave is the propagation of a disturbance that produces a variation in its path…) of the magnitude of a millimeter. Each cosmic object emits different categories of light depending on its age, composition and temperature: to get a complete picture of an object, modern astronomy combines observations of different wavelengths, all of which complement each other.
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