Just one step away

finally, after an incubation of several (!) months, the article I wrote with a colleague during my internship at ESO has been published on Science in School! it's about ALMA, a huge radiotelescope that is currently being built in the desert of northern Chile...

...and it's supposed to be read by young kids in their last years of school, so we tried to make it catchy and pedagogic at the same time — tough task, hope it works :-)

The ALMA Observatory: the sky is only one step away

Imagine hiking in the Atacama region, high in the Andes of northern Chile, one of the driest and remotest spots on Earth. At altitudes of 5000 m and higher, life is not easy here: the atmospheric pressure is much lower than at sea level, and oxygen is scarce.

The landscape, dominated by large volcanoes and other mountain peaks, occasionally decorated by salt flats and picturesque formations of ice and snow, hardly resembles a typical view of our planet. Then, in the midst of this arid and abandoned region, you become aware of a gigantic construction — could those be huge satellite dishes?

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Read the full text on the website of Science in School.

In the image, an ALMA antenna on the Chajnantor plateau, in northern Chile. Image credits: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)