Collaborative Research: Astronomy with CARMA

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Over the past three years the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter Astronomy (CARMA) was formed from the merger of two telescope arrays supported by the Division of Astronomical Science's University Radio Observatories (URO) Program, these being Caltech?s Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) array of six 10.4-meter-diameter telescopes, and the Berkeley Illinois Maryland Association (BIMA) array of nine 6.1-meter-diameter telescopes. With commissioning at the new site now complete, CARMA will achieve resolutions as high as 0.2 arcseconds at a wavelength of 1mm and, due to its heterogeneous combination of telescope diameters, will provide excellent imaging over a wide range of angular scales. When new receivers are installed in 2009, CARMA's sensitivity in the 1 mm band will be an order of magnitude greater than that of the previous arrays. The new science enabled by CARMA covers a broad range of astronomical topics, including star formation and molecular clouds, studies of external galaxies, and the investigation of solar system objects. CARMA is a pathfinder for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and a pipeline for training experts in the field of millimeter interferometry to take full advantage of ALMA's capabilities for US astronomy.