The installation of twelve new antennas inaugurated on September 30, allows the Noema radio telescope Installed on the plateau of Bure, in the Hautes Alpes, allows the equipment to become the most powerful millimeter radio telescope in the Northern Hemisphere. Result of a collaboration between the CNRS, the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, and the Instituto Geográfico Nacional ( Spain). the radio telescope built and managed by the Institute of Millimetric Radio Astronomy (Iram) is ready to perform unprecedented observations.
The observatory November was inaugurated on September 30 in the presence of Antoine Petit, President and CEO of the CNRS, Martin Stratmann, President of the MPG, Rafael Bachiller, Director of The National Astronomical Observatory of the’IGNKarl Schuster, Director of Iram, Stéphane Guilloteau, Chairman of the Iram Steering Committee, and Reinhard Genzel, 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics and member of the Iram Steering Committee.
© Jeff GRAPHY/IRAM
After the inauguration of its first antenna in 2014, the radio-telescope equipped with twelve 15-meter antennas that can be moved on paths of up to 1.7 kilometers is a unique tool for astronomy research. Its resolving power and the sensitivity of the grating make it possible to collect light that has traveled up to 13 billion years to reach the Earth.
This commissioning crowns more than 40 years of European scientific collaboration. Founded in 1979 by the French CNRS and the German MPG, joined in 1990 by the Spanish IGN, Iram (headquarters is in Grenoble), is a world leader in the field of millimeter radio astronomy . It is now the most powerful millimeter radio telescope in the Northern Hemisphere. Millimeter radio astronomy studies light whose wavelength is of the order of magnitude of the millimeter. Each cosmic object emits different categories of light depending on its age, its composition and its temperature: in order to obtain a complete picture of an object, modern astronomy combines observations from different wavelengths, all complementary to each other
Noema’s antennas are equipped with very high sensitivity receivers, close to quantum limits. They operate in a network by interferometry: the signals received by all the antennas oriented towards the same region of space are combined and their resolving power is then that of a huge telescope which would have the same diameter as if it included them. all.
By changing the configuration of the antennas, astronomers can “zoom in” on a celestial object. Configurations can span distances from a few hundred meters to now 1.7 km. The network functions as a vari-lens camera. The larger the configuration, the more powerful the zoom: Noema’s maximum spatial resolution is so high that it would be able to distinguish a cell phone at a distance of more than 500 kilometers.
Noema is one of the few radio observatories in the world that can simultaneously measure a large number of signatures of molecules and atoms. These new observation possibilities, combined with its high sensitivity and very high spectral and spatial resolution, make Noema a unique instrument for understanding the complexity of interstellar matter and the constituent elements of the cosmos.
In addition to French, German and Spanish scientists, Iram supports more than 5,000 researchers from all over the world.
© IRAM/VLA/Mayall/DSS2/A. Schruba
They can thus study the cold matter of the cosmos, just a few degrees above absolute zero. They can study the formation, composition and dynamics of entire galaxies, stars in formation and at the end of their lives, comets or the environment of black holes. Noema is at the origin of major discoveries. The radio telescope observed the most distant galaxy known to date, formed shortly after the Big Bang (more than 13 billion years). He recently measured the temperature of cosmic microwave background radiation at a very early stage in the Universe, a first that will make it possible to trace and better constrain the effects of dark energy. In 2022 Noema discovered the first example of a rapidly growing black hole 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 at the origin of the latest discoveries of molecules in discs around young stars, veritable cradles of planetary formation.
© Jérémie BOISSIER/IRAM/CNRS PHOTO LIBRARY
Noema is also part of the consortium Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) which published in 2019 the first image of a black hole as well as in early 2022 that of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. It made its first observations for the collaboration in 2021 and then 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-meter one installed in Spain, Noema will allow the EHT to make animations with even more precise details. Both facilities are crucial for the EHT collaboration, for the study and for the understanding of the physics of black holes. 2-