Press Releases
ALMA Reveals Hidden Planet-Forming Structures in the Smallest Disks
14 October, 2026
Using ALMA’s exceptionally sharp vision, astronomers have uncovered rings, gaps, and cavities in extremely compact disks around young stars. The observations show that planet-formation structures extend into regions comparable in size to the inner Solar System, suggesting that many small disks may have looked smooth simply because their details were too small to resolve. Some of the most striking...
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Where is ALMA?
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Operations Support Facility (OSF)
The ALMA Operations Support Facility, at an altitude of 2900 metres in the Chilean Andes, serves as the focal point for most of the observatory activities, hosting the antenna control room, laboratories and offices. Address: Kilómetro 121, Carretera CH 23, San Pedro de Atacama, Chile Phone: +56 2 2467 6416 -
Array Operation Site (AOS)
The ALMA Array Operations Site, at an altitude of 5000 metres in the Chilean Andes, houses the ALMA antennas and the correlator, the fastest data processing system ever used at an astronomical site. Coordinates: 23° 1′ 23.5″ S, 67° 45′ 16.7″ W
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Santiago Central Offices (SCO)
The ALMA headquarters, located in Vitacura district in Santiago of Chile, houses the Director’s Office and its associated functional units, as well as astronomers, technicians and administrative staff, and the ALMA archive. Address: Alonso de Córdova 3107, Vitacura , Santiago, Chile Phone: +56 2 2467 6100
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ALMA, a worldwide collaboration
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) -the largest astronomical project in existence- is a single telescope of revolutionary design, composed of 66 high precision antennas located on the Chajnantor Plateau, 5000 meters altitude in northern Chile. ALMA is an international partnership of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan, together with NRC (Canada), NSTC and ASIAA (Taiwan), and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile.
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