Origins of Chemical Complexities
27 September, 2024 / Read time: 1 minute
Illustration of the improvement that the WSU will provide for spectral scan observations. The top panel shows the spectral scans across multiple bands obtained for NGC 253 (Mart ́ın et al. 2021). The bottom panel shows the spectral scan for IRAS 16293-2422B from PILS (Jørgensen et al. 2016). In each plot, the instantaneous spectral coverage of the actual observation is shown in black, while that of the ALMA2030 upgrade is shown in blue for the minimum requirements and in orange for the goal. The ALMA2030 upgrade will improve the instantaneous coverage by a factor of 2–4 for coarse spectral resolution scans such as NGC 253. For surveys such as PILS, which required 18 separate tunings at high spectral resolution, similar spectral coverage can be achieved in only two tunings. Credit: Carpenter et al. - ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)