Hidden Universe Page #4

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And when you see the night sky

as they would have,

it's not hard to see why.

Greg isn't the only one that

sees the world differently.

This mosquito is on the prowl

for its next meal.

As it hunts,

it sees the world in a very

different way than we do.

It doesn't just

see visible light.

It also has

an array of sensors

that detect infrared

heat signatures.

That's how it can

find you in the dark.

And it will.

Like the mosquito,

a new telescope called "ALMA"

is being built to detect

signals outside of visible light.

ALMA is an extraordinary

collaboration

between the European

Southern Observatory,

North America and East Asia.

A decade of work

is almost complete.

If you're thinking this looks

more like a construction site

than a telescope,

you'd be right.

This is base camp.

ALMA has a completely different

design from optical telescopes,

because it's looking

for microwave signals.

And the best place for

a microwave telescope

is high and dry

at over 16,000 feet

on the top of a mountain.

But 16,000 feet is not a place

you can work for very long.

The thin air and dryness

make it hard to breathe

and altitude sickness

can lead to unconsciousness

or even death.

So engineers here have come up

with a creative solution.

They're building

each individual antenna

at a low-altitude base camp.

And then each hundred-ton dish

is driven up the mountain,

one giant piece at a time.

Normal vehicles

aren't up to the task,

so engineers have built

the world's biggest

remote-control truck.

An operator can guide each

antenna into its place in the array

by using laser-guided steering

and collision detectors.

These safely guide the dish

onto a concrete pad,

where it will be ready to

power up and get to work.

Every time

I see ALMA,

I think of how far we've come.

This isn't just

a big telescope.

It's an array of 66 dishes

that are connected by

a giant supercomputer

to make these separate dishes

act as one huge "eye in the sky".

It makes ALMA the most

powerful telescope ever built.

Bathed in its eerie,

green light,

ALMA lets us peer into the

farthest corners of the universe.

These are the Antennae galaxies

when viewed by normal, optical light.

But ALMA sees so much more.

One of her first images

was a revelation.

A huge, dense cloud

of hydrogen gas

hidden within the galaxies.

Enough gas to form

more than a billion stars.

Centaurus A was the first

galaxy I ever studied.

Using telescopes like ALMA,

we can see a massive black hole

at the center of this galaxy.

It's spewing out plasma at

almost half the speed of light.

Every galaxy, nebula

and star in the sky

has secrets hidden from us.

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