Hands up for a community assembly!

Sixth European ALMA Regional Centre community assembly

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The Sixth European ALMA Regional Centre community assembly meeting will take place virtually on the 17th of April at 11:00 CEST and can be accessed via this Microsoft Teams link. During the meeting, staff from the European ALMA Regional Centre will present updates on ALMA Cycle 10, in particular the procedures for Joint Proposals with other facilities including the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, the Space Telescope Science Institute’s James Webb Space Telescope, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array. In addition, you will hear about the new capabilities offered in Cycle 10, including ALMA Band 1, and the support that the European ARC network offers the community. 

Meeting of ALMA Young Astronomers 2023

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March 10th marked the successful completion of the second Meeting of ALMA Young Astronomers, MAYA 2023. The goal of MAYA is to provide a platform where early career astronomers can present their recent ALMA work, and to facilitate new collaborations and projects through the interaction with other participants and staff working in the ARC nodes.

Work presented at MAYA showcased some of the most exciting research done by early-career astronomers who are interested in ALMA. This week-long virtual conference included participants from around the world who gave talks on topics ranging from protoplanetary disks to high redshift galaxies. The conference had a total of 192 registrants, with 69 abstracts submitted. There were 51 talks on the final MAYA 2023 program, and the majority of these talks have been recorded and will be available shortly on the YouTube channel of the European ALMA Regional Centre Network. The full program can be found on the MAYA 2023 webpage, along with an abstract booklet, and PDFs of the three invited talks (Astronomer on Duty, the ALMA Science Archive, and the Future of ALMA).

Hands up for a community assembly!

Fifth European ALMA Regional Centre community assembly

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The Fifth European ALMA Regional Centre community assembly meeting will take place virtually on the 24th of March at 11:00 AM CET and can be accessed via this Microsoft Teams link. During the meeting, staff from the European ALMA Regional Centre will present updates on the current and future ALMA cycle, including the imminent ALMA cycle 9, which is scheduled to be announced the day before the meeting. In addition, you will hear about the support for using ALMA that the European ARC network offers the community. There will also be a dedicated question and answer session where staff from the European ALMA Regional Centre will be on hand to answer your questions.

ALMA at the European Astronomical Society meeting

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The next meeting of the European Astronomical Society will take place in Valencia (Spain) from 27 June to 1 July 2022. This conference will be in-person. The abstract submission deadline has already passed but registration is open until the start of the conference.

Building bridges: The lifecycle of dust and gas in the Milky Way with ALMA and SKA – EAS S7 symposium

Our Galaxy and its immediate neighbourhood are the only regions where we can undertake detailed studies of the physics driving the formation and evolution of astrophysical objects throughout the entire life cycle of the interstellar medium. ALMA is playing a groundbreaking and fundamental role in the study of a broad range of environments and phenomena due to its unprecedented spatial resolution and sensitivity. At the same time, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is now under construction, and it will provide a unique perspective on our Galaxy, complementary to that of ALMA.

Within the life cycle of dust and gas, accretion, fragmentation, feedback, astrochemistry, and temporal changes are common to many astrophysical objects. The respective communities investigating these objects often do not interact – even though they are using many of the same techniques. Symposium 7 is dedicated to building bridges between communities studying events of similar nature in the life cycle of gas and dust but at different astronomical scales and in different environments. The program of the symposium contains five invited talks focusing on accretion and fragmentation on large and small spatial scales, feedback in star-forming regions and evolved stars as well as synergies between ALMA/SKA and other observing facilities.

This style of event- instead of object-focused symposium will hopefully attract many contributors from different fields and communities, lead to interesting discussions and foster new collaborations.

More information about the topics and programme of the symposium can be found here:

ALMA in Europe: support by the European ALMA Regional Centre Network and new ways of interacting with data through the ALMA Science Archive

In this lunch session we aim to present to the European astronomical community how ALMA user support in Europe has evolved over the last years, the various types of support it offers, and the ways the European astronomical community can make use of this support. We will provide an update on the ALMA Science Archive and the tools that were developed to maximise its science output. We will furthermore discuss the outcomes of the ALMA Redesign the User eXperience (RedUX) project and show some of the actions that have been taken regarding user support and archive development. We will finish by taking time to discuss recent relevant changes within ALMA that are of direct interest to the astronomical community, including for example the distributed peer review system of proposals and how the connection between the astronomical community and the European ARC network can be further improved. More information can be found here.

During the conference, ALMA will have a booth in the exhibition space where interested conference participants can visit to ask questions about ALMA and the ARC network and take home merchandise.

ALminer: ALMA archive mining and visualization toolkit

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It is our pleasure to announce the release of ALminer: ALMA archive mining and visualization toolkit!

ALminer is a novel Python-based code that enables users to efficiently query, analyse, and visualize the ALMA Science Archive. Users can programmatically query the archive for positions, target names, or any other keywords in the archive metadata (e.g. proposal title, abstract, scientific category) in a simple way. ALminer’s plotting routines allow the query results to be visualised, and its analysis functions allow users to filter the results and check whether certain frequencies of interest are covered in the queried observations. The code also allows users to directly download ALMA data products in FITS format and/or the raw data that can be used for manual image processing. ALminer has been designed to make mining the ALMA archive as simple as possible, while being flexible to be customised according to the user’s scientific interests. The code is released with a detailed tutorial Jupyter notebook, introducing ALminer’s common functions as well as some of its more advanced options.

For more information about how to install and use ALminer, please visit the documentation or GitHub pages.

ALminer is a collaboration between Allegro, the ALMA Regional Centre in The Netherlands, and the University of Vienna (Austria) as part of the EMERGE ERC-StG project. With the public release of this new software, our goal is to provide the astronomical community with a new easy-to-use toolkit that facilitates the scientific exploitation of the rich ALMA science archive.

If you use ALminer as part of your research, please consider citing Ahmadi & Hacar 2021.

For suggestions and collaborations, please e-mail Aida Ahmadi.

ALminer example

Example of ALminer query for the science keywords “High-mass star formation” with an overview plot of queried observations.

I-TRAIN: ALMA Training Sessions

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The European ARC Network is offering a series of online topical training sessions focused on the analysis of ALMA and interferometric data in general. The sessions will cover a wide range of topics of interest to the ALMA user community with the aim to help users gain expertise in working with interferometric data. Each training session will be one hour long and will include a live demo and an interactive Q&A section.

The following is a list of training sessions currently being offered. We will update this page as more sessions are offered. Click on each topic for more information about how to participate.

  1. Imaging with the ALMA Pipeline (December 4, 2020 – 11:00 CET)
  2. ALMA Science Archive update and ARI-L (December 15, 2020 – 11:00 CET)
  3. UVMultiFit: a versatile library for fitting models directly to visibility data (January 15, 2021 – 11:00 CET)

 

New Allegro Program Manager: Violette Impellizzeri

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We are excited to announce that Violette Impellizzeri has joined Allegro as our program manager!

Violette received her PhD in 2008 at the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomie in Bonn, on the topic of “molecular tori in the core of AGN”. After her PhD, she moved as a postdoc to NRAO, in Charlottesville, to work on the Megamaser Cosmology Project. It was during this time that the ALMA telescope began construction, and as NRAO was one of the ALMA partners, she soon became excited at the idea of being part of such an important project and furthering her interferometry interests. For this reason, in 2011 she moved to the Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) in Chile as a commissioning postdoc and science fellow; during commissioning she also worked on early VLBI testing, science verification, and high frequency observing techniques. In 2014, once operations began, she was hired as an operations astronomer taking on new tasks such as the Phase II Group (P2G) Lead, ‘friend of VLBI’ and Proposal Handling Team (PHT) lead. On October 1st, she joined the Allegro ARC Node in Leiden, taking on the role of Program Manager, and is very excited to be returning to Europe and connecting with the Allegro team and the ALMA scientific community in The Netherlands.

We look forward to working with Violette and wish her all the best.

European ALMA Regional Centre Community Assembly

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The European ALMA Regional Centre invites all European ALMA users to a short virtual community assembly on October 8 at 10:00 CEST. After a long period of suspended science observing, there is now a path towards getting back on sky and collecting science data with ALMA again. At this community meeting, we will update you on the timeline for recovery and can answer any questions you may have on your ALMA projects and support from the European ARC network.

Reserve the date: 8 October at 10:00 CEST. The meeting can be accessed at this link.

Don’t hesitate to e-mail Allegro in case of questions, comments, or concerns. Looking forward to seeing you then!

EAS2020 – Special Session Nr. 13: Eight years of ALMA ground-breaking results.

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We would like to bring to your attention the special session ‘Eight years of ALMA ground-breaking results: A joint venture between the ALMA user community and the ALMA Regional Centres‘ that is organised as part of the yearly meeting of the European Astronomical Society. The conference will take place in Leiden, The Netherlands, on June 29 – July 3, 2020. The Special Session No. 13 will be held on the last day of the conference (July 3rd).

The Special Session SS13 will focus on scientific results that emphasise the connection between the ALMA users and the EU ARC network, and include:

  • Scientific highlights from large programs.
  • Scientific results from special modes with EU-specific strengths:
    high frequencies, polarization, solar observations, deep fields, data combination.
  • Results based on archival research and data mining.
  • Community and EU ARC network software/tools development.
  • Optimization of observations setup and data calibration.
  • Computing facilities for data reduction and analysis.

For more information on the SS13, please visit this link.

For general information on the EAS 2020, please click here.

Abstract submission is open for the SS13 in a form of oral or poster presentations. In order to submit your abstract, please visit the Abstract portal:

Sincerely,
The EAS2020 SS13 SOC.

The future of ALMA support at the 42nd ESO Users Committee

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The ESO Users Committee (UC) annual meeting will take in Garching on 26-27 April, 2018. Each year the UC meeting has one session dedicated to a special topic. In 2018 this special topic is the future of ALMA User Support.

Therefore, the feedback from EU ALMA users would be particularly important. The UC has prepared a poll to receive the feedback from the community at the following link:
https://www.eso.org/extra/surveys/index.php?sid=34365

The poll will be active until **March 26th, 2018**.

The UC also welcomes input through the national contacts. You can find more details in the following announcement:
https://www.eso.org/sci/publications/announcements/sciann17100.html