In October 2011, the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) officially opened its doors to the astronomical community with the launch of its first image : the collision of the Antenna galaxies, demonstrating its potential and heralding the start of a successful decade of the astronomy.
When originally opened for scientific observations, the ALMA array, which is located on the Chajnantor plateau in northern Chile, was operating at 5,000 meters with only 12 of its 66 antennas.
Since 2011, ALMA has been in great demand from astronomers around the world; a demand that far exceeds the time available.
ALMA antennas are separated by up to 16 kilometers. They function as a single massive telescope to examine the universe at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, which are a thousand times longer than the wavelengths of visible light.
ALMA has such a powerful spatial resolution thanks to interferometry . It remains the world's largest and most powerful millimeter and submillimeter telescope in operation after ten years and was one of eight telescopes used in the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration to capture the first image of a black hole, the supermassive object in the center of the galaxy M87.
To date, the observatory has provided data for almost 2,500 scientific articles.
