Original subtitles

Mountains, rocks and desert as far as the eye can see.

An alien world, craggy, barren, lonely.

But something big is in the making here.

Huge dishes are being transported into the mountains.

A tough task for man and technology in a place that is extreme in every way.

One of the highest plateaus in the Atacama Desert has been chosen as the

location for the largest observatory on Earth.

the Atacama Large Millimeter Array.

The telescopes peer into the nebulae in space.

They observe the birth and death of stars and planets.

They are the eyes of the Atacama, exploring the origins of our universe.

The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is a remote, inhospitable place.

It seems otherworldly, almost like an exoplanet in a science fiction film.

The arid plateau and rugged volcanoes are part of the Andes, whose higher

peaks rake the skies at over 6,000 meters.

The landscape is made up of stony deserts and soda lakes.

At first glance, a region that appears inherently hostile to any form of life.

And yet, vicuñas have mastered survival at these lofty heights.

These cousins of the llama roam many kilometers a day in search of food and

water.

The border area between Chile, Bolivia and Argentina is their natural habitat.

It is a place where humans cannot survive for long.

There is very little water in the Atacama, and what there is is often

salty.

Ideal conditions for flamingos.

Any water that is occasionally precipitated collects on a huge plateau.

This is the Salar de Atacama, the largest salt lake in Chile.

Seldom is the entire surface covered in water.

The lake consists mostly of a series of individual pools and dried-out tarns.

The water dissolves minerals from the soil but evaporates quickly in extremely

dry air.

What remains is salty lakes and crusted mineral deposits.

In the midst of this forlorn landscape, 3,000 meters above sea level, lies the

base station of the world's largest observatory, ALMA, the Atacama Large

Millimeter Submillimeter Array.

But the heart of the installation is actually 28 kilometers away and a

further 2,000 meters higher up.

The Chajnantor Plateau, 5,000 meters above sea level, is the location

selected for ALMA's 66 radio antennas.

This vast installation has a long and fascinating history.

John Stoke of the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory in

Charlottesville, Virginia.

The history of the ALMA project goes back actually many decades, and in each

of the regions of the world that are now contributing to ALMA, there were ideas

about building an array of telescopes.

It was more recently that all of those partners got together and decided to

build one really big telescope as opposed to each partner building their

own.

Twenty nations from three global regions participated in the project.

ALMA is an international astronomy facility which is a partnership of

Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with Chile.

The Operation Support Facility, or OSF, is the base station and control center

of ALMA.

From here, The antennas on the high plateau are monitored and controlled.

A challenge for scientists around the world.

This is pioneering work.

ALMA is opening up a new window to the universe.

The antenna dishes do not receive visible light, but radio waves.

Astronomers hope that ALMA will afford them insights into hidden regions and

wide-ranging new discoveries.

One of the big fundamental questions in astronomy in general is how did we get

here? How did life form here on the early Earth?

Astronomers also want to fathom how the stars and galaxies we see today came

into existence.

And how solar systems and planets such as our Earth afford almost not just

going to be able to look at debris systems and infer the presence of

planets it's going to be able to look at planet formation in action but that's

indeed outer space is full of exotic objects and the aim is to unlock their

secrets too one of the most exciting things about galaxies is the fact that

they have a large black hole in the middle and in our galaxy this is what we

have

Black holes are invisible.

Only the material within the influence of their huge gravitational pull can be

seen. For the first time, we have the resolution to be able to look very, very

close to a black hole.

And the equipment that allows them to do this is ALMA, the base station of

the antenna array in the middle of nowhere.

The approach roads stretch for hundreds of kilometers across the desert.

The antennas are brought here from Europe, North America and Japan.

Mostly over 12 meters in diameter, the Alma dishes are so large they cannot be

transported in one piece.

They must be assembled at the base station.

It is laborious work and takes several weeks to get a single antenna ready for

use.

Three separate areas are set up for the various assembly stages of the antennas.

The European and Japanese teams work out in the open.

the Americans mostly in an enormous hangar.

The antennas are individually designed, but they all have to meet the same

demands.

It's the only way they can scan the heavens together in perfect harmony.

Astronomers have high hopes for ALMA.

The unprecedented accuracy in long-wave radio observations is expected to help

answer many important questions.

How are solar systems similar to our own formed?

Stars like our Sun, with numerous planets rotating around them.

And are there rock planets similar to Earth that rotate around their central

star at just the right distance to have water and support life?

The search for planets similar to our Earth has exercised man's imagination

for centuries.

With ALMA, astronomers hope to research the birth of planets.

This is Aaron Boley's area of expertise.

The astrophysicist from the University of Florida and his team were amongst the

first to accomplish observations even before ALMA was fully completed.

The research team were therefore able to use ALMA to gain a better understanding

of the birth of planets.

The way we think planets form is that dust first collects and eventually

sticks together.

And those then stick together to more dust and eventually you have rocks.

And then those rocks go to very large objects.

And those rocks we see as leftovers today.

We call them planetesimals. And when we look out and see them today, we call

them comets and asteroids.

And those eventually come together and they form very larger objects.

And some of those are eventually going to become planets.

But how are planets actually born?

For the first time, ALMA allows scientists far more accurate insights

previously hidden from the view of earlier telescopes.

We have the unique opportunity to use ALMA to look at planet formation.

And we looked at the nearby star Fomalhaut in order to test planet

formation theory.

The reason why we want to look at Fomalhaut is because it's a very bright

star. It's about 15 to 20 times as bright as the sun.

And it's actually fairly nearby.

It's 25 light years away, which is really a stone's throw in astronomical

measurements.

Other telescopes have already discovered a broad band of dust around the formal

Holt star.

In the long wavelength area of the ALMA surveys, however, the astronomers have

detected a sharply defined ring.

Aaron's calculations and simulations came up with startling results.

One of the best explanations for the formal Holt ring is that the dust is

being shaped by two low-mass planets.

grains are truncated sharply in both the inner and the outer edges.

And we think the best way to confine that is to have two planets.

This is how it is possible to suggest the existence of newly born, as yet

unknown, planets.

In addition, astronomers also discover more about the origins of our own solar

system. and the earth itself almost not just a powerful telescope for looking at

the end stages of planet formation through the debris the leftovers but for

capturing the chemistry and what's happening during the

throes of planet formation because that's going to give us some idea of

what the building blocks are made of for planets and that will give us some idea

of what can go into

terrestrial planets and eventually perhaps habitable planets.

Meanwhile, astronomers have found over 800 planets beyond our own solar system.

There are many telescopes currently devoted to the search for a second

Earth, including the Hubble Space Telescope.

Hubble observes space in visible light.

as does the Very Large Telescope and other observatories around the globe.

Their eyes are lenses and mirrors, and these optical telescopes make it

possible to observe space in the same light spectrum as is visible to the

human eye.

ALMA, on the other hand, consists of dozens of antenna dishes that record

long-wave radiation.

These radio waves are invisible to humans, and they can be received both

day and night.

Our eyes only see the stars at night.

During the day, they are obscured to the human eye by radiant sunlight.

Like optical telescopes, we only perceive what glows, the superheated

surface of the stars.

But ALMA can peer deep into the dark, cold clouds, because these also emit

radiation, albeit of a different kind.

Astronomers observe the entire electromagnetic spectrum with a range of

instruments. The Milky Way, from short-wave gamma radiation to X-rays

and visible light.

through infrared radiation, and microwaves, all the way

to long radio waves.

Every area imparts special information.

The radio waves received by ALMA have a wavelength that is measured in

millimeters.

That is around a thousand times longer than any visible light waves.

This is why radio waves can penetrate even dark dust clouds.

But a telescope that could give us an image as sharp as Hubble through this

long-wave radiation would have to be well over 10 kilometers in diameter.

To construct a telescope of this magnitude would be impossible.

But there is a solution.

A number of antennas linked to each other to make them function like a

single, huge telescope.

That is the ALMA concept.

Positioned around an area with a circumference of about 16 kilometers, 66

antennas receive radio signals from outer space.

The unimaginable quantity of data is collected by the installation's

supercomputer.

It can perform 16 quadrillion.

That is 16 million billion computing operations per second.

It is only this powerful computing ability and the complex programs

developed during many years of preliminary preparations that enable the

antenna's signals to be converted into useful images.

Even during the setup phase, astronomers were already carrying out the first

optical tests.

They explored the antennae galaxies, a spectacular heavenly phenomenon in which

two galaxies collide.

The clearest image so far was made by the Hubble Space Telescope.

But what actually happens in those dark clouds around the collision area

remained hidden from optical telescopes.

Observations with ALMA have now revealed formerly invisible activity zones.

This is where new stars are formed from gigantic clouds of dust and gas.

The very first test runs brought new discoveries.

Normally, the millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths observed by

ALMA cannot be received on Earth.

They are absorbed almost entirely by vapor in our atmosphere.

But the air in the Atacama Desert is dry enough to allow these radio waves to

penetrate.

The Chajnantor Plateau, at 5,000 meters, is large enough to house ALMA's antenna

array.

There are some bizarre snow sculptures here, called penitentas.

This is a typical manifestation of the climate conditions.

extreme aridity, high altitude and intense sunlight.

At the edge of the Chajnantor Plateau is a single antenna that has been measuring

long-wave radiation for years.

APEX, or the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment.

Carlos de Broek is one of the astronomers carrying out studies with

both APEX and ALMA.

Before every observation, they have to measure the vapor levels in the

atmosphere. So the telescope will now start moving from high up in the sky,

where we look through the atmosphere.

So you can see it's moving right now, and it goes all the way down, and it

measures how transparent the atmosphere is at different elevations.

And it's continuously recording the data as it is moving down.

From this, we know how transparent the atmosphere is and how much we need to

correct our data for.

It's only these corrections that allow valuable images to be created.

When there are no storms, and if there is not too much vapor in the atmosphere,

both APEX and ALMA can be operated around the clock.

The obscure area of the Taurus molecular cloud is one of the nearest regions of

star formation.

But only with radio telescopes such as APEX can the stellar birthplaces within

these clouds be spotted.

The same goes for Orion, sometimes called the Hunter.

Orion is a striking constellation.

Near the three stars of Orion's belt is a dark nebula.

The dust clouds conceal a highly active region.

Observed in millimeter radio wavelength, the active zones emerge clearly.

This is where stars are born.

Here, from the ash created by stellar explosions, is where the next generation

of heavenly bodies will evolve.

APEX is still in use as its antenna encompasses a large section of the

heavens.

ALMA's antennas, on the other hand, observe a much smaller area, but with

much more resolution and in more detail than was ever possible before.

ESO, the European Southern Observatory in Garching near Munich, Germany, is one

of ALMA's partners.

This is where Carlos de Broglie researches the most distant objects in

space. I look at the youngest galaxies in the beginning of the universe, when

the universe was still very young and so they're very distant, so they're about

less than 10% of their current age, and I want to see how they were formed and

how did they evolve into the galaxies that we see now.

This gazing into the depths of outer space is also a voyage into the past.

It takes us back to the time some 13.75 billion years ago, just after the Big

Bang in which our universe was created.

At first, there was only hydrogen and helium, the lightest elements.

From these gaseous clouds, the first generations of stars were formed.

What we really want to know is when these objects formed in the age of the

universe. And how did they form within the galaxy?

Did they form in the center? Did they form outside?

How did they evolve?

And how did the heavy elements that we observe in the local universe, like

carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, how did they form from the hydrogen and helium

that was formed in the Big Bang?

Astronomers can also detect these elements far off in the universe,

because ALMA allows atoms and molecules to be identified by means of their

characteristic radiation.

The heavier elements form in the hot interior of the star.

Massive explosions send them shooting into space.

Huge gas and dust clouds result.

The raw material from which a new generation of stars develops.

ALMA allows you to look at tracers, especially molecular gas and atomic gas,

that you cannot see with optical telescopes because it's all obscured by

the dust.

So while the dust is the enemy of the optical telescope, it is the friend of

ALMA. In the control room, scientists work day and night.

The astronomers here at the OSF have to coordinate and process observation

requests and deadlines from colleagues from around the world.

The entire undertaking is an enormous challenge, as ALMA operates at the

limits of scientific and engineering possibility.

A thousand things have to work in order for the Super Telescope to deliver the

anticipated results.

The astronomical observations are partly headed up by Alison Peck.

Normally, she works at the NRAO in Charlottesville, Virginia, one of the

ALMA partner institutes.

Alison Peck belongs to a group of astronomers who use ALMA to investigate

black holes.

One of the most exciting things about galaxies is the fact that they have a

large black hole in the middle. And this sounds very exotic when we say black

hole. What we mean is when you have a large amount of mass in the center of a

galaxy that collapses under gravity, it collapses and collapses. It just gets

smaller and smaller and smaller until it occupies virtually no space.

It has almost no volume.

And so although it has this huge amount of mass, it occupies a very small space,

but its effects can be felt at large distances because it has a very strong

gravitational field.

An invisible monster star that swallows everything that comes near it.

How can you observe something like that?

Black holes can be very difficult to study because we can't actually see the

black hole itself.

The gravitational field is so strong that nothing can escape, so nothing gets

out of the black hole, even light.

So the only way we can study black holes is by studying the gas that's near them.

And this gas very often is being sucked into the center of the black hole. So

it's falling in, but it doesn't fall directly in. It falls in like water

going down a drain. It spirals around because it has angular momentum.

And it has viscosity.

So that means that as it falls in from the outside of the galaxy, it spins

around. And as it goes in, it gets hotter, it gets more energetic, and it

radiates huge amounts of energy.

The enormous amount of energy that is released in the region bordering a black

hole is seen as a bright, glaring light that surrounds the invisible center.

A black hole itself is defined by the Schwarzschild radius.

This is the distance from the black hole itself within which nothing can escape,

even light.

But a lot of material that's falling toward the black hole does escape before

it hits the Schwarzschild radius.

One of the reasons for that is because you have strong magnetic fields with

this material being drawn in. And this can cause matter to be shot in two

directions, in what we call jets, bipolar jets, away from the black hole.

Using ALMA, astronomers want to study the gas clouds surrounding black holes

and explore their properties.

That also applies to the black hole in the middle of our own Milky Way.

To establish its existence, astronomers invested years of observations and

calculations.

The first step was to observe the stars in its vicinity as closely as possible.

In doing so, astronomers discovered that the complicated paths taken by stars as

they whizz around the central point can only be explained by assuming the

existence of a huge mass, 27,000 light years from our own Sun and four million

times heavier.

A massive, invisible center of gravity.

A black hole.

ALMA astronomer Kartik Sheeth wants to get up close and personal to it.

The amazing thing about ALMA is that for the first time, we have the resolution

to be able to look very, very close to a black hole because...

of ALMA's superb resolution.

And what we're doing with ALMA is looking at the molecular gas as it comes

down the barred galaxy, goes through the nuclear ring into the center of the

black hole.

And by measuring how the gas is moving around the black hole, we should be able

to learn exactly what is feeding this monster in the center of the galaxy.

How does the black hole eat? What does it eat for breakfast?

How does it grow over time?

That's the question we're answering.

Astronomers are currently observing something extraordinary.

A gas cloud is getting very close to the center of our Milky Way.

After their initial observations, astronomers calculated how the gas cloud

would be disrupted by the black hole in the next years.

One part of the cloud will be able to escape.

Another will be irrevocably sucked in and devoured by the insatiable galactic

monster.

Alma needs to penetrate the darkness and uncover further details of this cosmic

drama.

The Chechnantor Plateau is a gift for these radio wave observations.

It is large enough for Alma's huge antennae field and at 5,000 meters is so

high up that the thin atmosphere offers almost no interference to reception.

Clouds are rarely spotted around here.

The Atacama Desert lies on the leeward side of the Andes.

Most precipitation is deposited on the eastern slopes of the mountainous

massive before it reaches the Atacama.

Working at these altitudes is potentially dangerous.

Dizziness, passing out, and even edema of the lungs are a constant threat.

The lack of oxygen affects both work capacity and judgment ability.

A mistake while handling these huge pieces of equipment could prove fatal.

Which is why everyone who works up here constantly carries a portable oxygen

system.

And there is plenty to do.

The antennas must be maintained and repaired.

Most of the work, however, involves repositioning the antennas.

To do this, they use unique, enormous vehicles that have been especially

designed and built for the purpose.

Depending on the type of astronomical observation, the antennas are frequently

repositioned, sometimes closer together, then further apart.

Precision is essential, but that's not easy when you have to move telescopes

that weigh over 100 tons.

Only the perfect interplay of man and technology can ensure that ALMA's

scrutiny of previously concealed vistas are scientifically useful.

The antennae galaxies are not only interesting as visual tests for ALMA

observations, they also show the threats to our Milky Way that

loom in the future.

In around 4 billion years, the Milky Way will, in all likelihood, encounter the

Andromeda Galaxy.

The collision will release huge clouds of gas and dust into space.

This dust is the raw material from which new stars and planets will be created.

Since the universe began with the Big Bang, there has been a constant process

of creation and destruction.

Even the lifetime of our sun is limited.

In some five billion years, it will balloon into a vast red giant, engulfing

and destroying our planet.

It will explode in pulsing, violent eruptions, sending its mass into space,

creating new gas and dust clouds.

This process of the death of stars is what ESO astronomer Matthias Mocher is

working on at the Agalanda Institute in Bonn.

His research target is, from a galactic point of view, not very far away.

A red giant in a sculptor constellation only about 1,000 light years away.

The life cycle of stars is basically that stars will form in large molecular

clouds where they collapse.

And when they become dense enough, they will start burning hydrogen into helium.

And this is basically what most stars are doing. This is what our sun is doing

right now. It's fusing hydrogen into helium.

But once the hydrogen is used up, the star will blow up and become a red giant

and start losing mass from its surface.

And those are the old dying stars that I'm working with.

His research concentrates on the vast mass of material that the dying star

blasts out into space.

Red giant stars will lose mass throughout their entire evolution until

they die, but at relatively low rates. But every 10,000 years or so, the star

will go through a thermal pulse, which means that it will burn helium very

rapidly inside the star. And this releases a burst of energy for only a

few hundred years, which causes the star to restructure and increase its

brightness. And the increase in brightness will also cause it to lose a

lot more mass for these few hundred years, and also at a higher velocity,

and sweep up material.

And because it continuously sweeps up material, it gets formed and pushed into

a very thin shell that expands away from the star.

And this shell is what we call a detached shell.

Up till now, this shell around the central star was very hard to study.

With ALMA, however, Researchers can now see inside this gas envelope and create

cross-section images of it.

And the high resolution brought surprising detail.

When we proposed for the observations, we thought that it was going to be a

star that originally was very similar to our Sun, possibly a little bit more

massive. But the ALMA results showed us that in fact it's a very...

different system compared to our Sun because it is not only a solitary star

sitting alone in space but it turns out that it has a companion star orbiting

around it. The effect of this newly discovered companion star is explained

by Matthias Merker by means of a simulation.

The companion is already forming the wind into a spiral, but at zero years

you will see that now the star is going through a thermal pulse and you can see

this very bright detached shell expanding away from the star.

And the companion will then shape the wind after the thermal pulse into this

very clear spiral structure which is expanding along with the detached shell.

And because the detached shell expands at a velocity higher than the previous

wind, it will sweep up the material from the previous mass loss.

and about 1800 years after the thermal pulse we can see that we see the same

structure that we see in the ALMA data.

The unexpected discovery of the spiral structure is only one example of the new

findings that ALMA now makes possible.

The ALMA data that we have now was taken during the cycle zero of ALMA early

science and only taken with 16 antennas and is already incredibly more than we

ever expected to get.

Where do we come from?

The answer to this question truly does lie in the stars.

The processes that occur during the birth and death of stars and planets are

also of vital significance to the search for the origins of life.

Because the chemical elements that we are all made of were created in the

calls of stars.

before being flung out into space by massive explosions.

This means that we human beings too are an integral part of the eternal cosmic

cycle.

Anthony Remigian is an astrochemist who works at the NRAO in Charlottesville,

Virginia.

His speciality is the search for organic molecules in space.

So we're trying to figure out how actually organic chemistry does happen

in space.

It's not as simple as going into a chemistry lab here on Earth and taking a

bucket of this and a bottle of that, putting it together and forming organic

molecules. Space is doing it.

has been doing it for billions of years and is forming some of the largest

organic molecules that we find here on Earth as well. And we're still trying to

figure out how space is actually forming these large molecules.

New technology-engaging methods have led to tremendous progress being made.

ALMA is going to give us the highest resolution. That means we can see the

smallest details of regions in the galaxy that are actually doing

chemistry. And ALMA is also going to be the most sensitive telescope in the

world to detect these large molecules in space.

Organic molecules in interstellar gas clouds are best shown in the millimeter

and submillimeter wavelength, which is what ALMA's antennas receive.

In the gas cloud surrounding a young star in our Milky Way, glucose molecules

were detected.

Glycolaldehyde, one of the components of the fundamental building blocks of life.

To be able to recognize molecules such as these, their characteristic radiation

must first be established in laboratory experiments.

These are then compared with the signals from space.

And this is how they are identified.

ALMA's special sensitivity for these signals is based on the complicated

receiver devices that can only function correctly at a temperature of minus 269

degrees centigrade.

They receive radio waves, filter the signals out of the atmospheric space

noise and refine them so the supercomputer can process the data

further.

Suitably chilled and securely packed in a vacuum pressure vessel, these

sensitive instruments are built into the antennas.

The so-called front end is the heart of every telescope, the central device that

receives radiation from space.

Only if everything works in perfect harmony, Can astronomers explore space

in this entirely new and exciting way?

Initial results are promising, but the search continues.

What we're looking for is the building blocks, the fundamental molecules that

build up things like RNA, proteins, and amino acids.

And so if we could figure out how these molecules form in space, and we could

figure out how they get to the early Earth, then we are answering the

question is how the building blocks of the organic material that make up you

and I, how the material that makes up RNA, self-replicating molecules,

actually formed and can evolve on early planets.

And we think that that starts in space.

The search for organic molecules in cosmic gas clouds leads to far-reaching

questions.

Do the building blocks of life really originate in space?

And if so, how did they land on Earth?

We also know that this organic material is contained in things like comets and

meteorites and asteroids.

And during the stages of planet formation, during the stages of star

formation, there is a period of what's called heavy bombardment, where we know

that planets get constantly hit with comets, meteorites, and asteroids.

So the same organic material...

that is floating out there in space that gets bottled up onto comets and

meteorites could actually be seeded into these early planets.

And so the same material that eventually led to the formation of life on Earth,

the same organic material that we know is floating around in space, could be

seeded onto planets throughout the galaxy and possibly kickstart the

formation of life on those planets as well.

If we consider the increasing number of newly discovered planets orbiting

foreign suns and the many organic molecules in space, it seems unlikely

that life could only exist here on Earth.

And who knows what else Alma will find in the furthest reaches of space.

The search for our cosmic origins has taken us to one of the most alien places

on our planet.

Almost like an outpost of some as yet unchartered territory,

the ALMA Control Center nestles on the slopes of the Andes.

With ALMA, astronomers are now beginning to see previously hidden details, and

they anticipate that new and unknown facts will come to light.

Their findings will lead to a whole new image of the universe.

Because the story of the stars, of planets, and of life does indeed lie in

the darkness, where the eyes of the Atacama can see.