The Chilean altiplano is a 5,000m high plateau in the northern Atacama desert which is rapidly becoming a focus for astronomers from around the world. Outside of Antarctica, it is the driest location on our planet. Within a decade ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimetre Array, a network of over 50 radio telescopes, costing over a billion dollars, will be spread over the plateau, connected as an interferometricarray. In the meantime, a few pioneer facilities have sprouted from the desert and are taking their first data.

One of these is NANTEN2, a 4-m sized sub-millimetre wave telescope, run by an international university consortium led by the Universities of Nagoya and Cologne (NANTEN is Japanese for southern sky). Members also come from South Korea, Switzerland and Chile, and as UNSW has just joined, Australia has become the sixth country in the club.

NANTEN2 will survey the southern skies in the sub-mm wavebands, a spectral regime for which the skies are opaque from even the driest locations in Australia. The telescope will map the distribution of warm molecular gas across the Galaxy, for instance in excited spectral lines from the carbon monoxide molecule and from the neutral carbon atom. Combined with similar measurements of ground state molecular lines mapped with our own Mopra telescope in Australia, the goal is to study the distribution and excitation conditions of the gas within the giant molecular clouds which line our Galaxy. These are the places where new stars are conceived, the coldest and darkest locations we know of, but also the home to a rich organic chemistry driven by the stellar conception itself.

UNSW’s joining the NANTEN2 consortium was facilitated through our leading an ARC LIEF grant, in collaboration with the Universities of Sydney and Macquarie. NANTEN2 marks Australia’s first direct involvement in the great astronomical adventure now unfolding on the Chilean altiplano.

¡Ensámblenos en la aventura!

Fig. 1: Within a decade the 5,100m high plateau behind the author will be littered with telescopes, forming ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimetre Array, the largest ground-based telescope project in history.	Fig. 2: Michael Burton with colleagues from the University of Nagoya in front of the 4m NANTEN2 telescope, celebrating UNSW’s joining the consortium.

Michael Burton