The National Science Council (NSC) and Academia Sinica yesterday announced that an international astronomy project, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), an array of radio telescopes located in Chile, in which Taiwan has participated, was launched on Thursday.
The ALMA project is an international project including countries from Europe, North America and East Asia, in cooperation with Chile. The project has installed 66 high-precision antennas with 12m and 7m diameter radio telescopes, which are capable of observing at wavelengths of between 0.3mm and 9.6mm, on the Chajnantor Plateau 5,000m above sea level in northern Chile.
Wang Jye-ming (王杰明), research fellow and deputy director of Academia Sinica’s Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, said the high resolution and sensitivity of the array is expected to provide insights on planet formation, star births during the early universe or even the origin of life and the solar system.
Photo: EPA
“As an example, the power of the ALMA’s high resolution is like being able to use a telescope at Kenting (墾丁) in Pingtung County to observe a coin or a ladybug on the tip of Taipei 101,” Wang said, adding that the ALMA’s resolution is about 10 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Taiwanese research team’s contribution to the ALMA project is mainly on the East Asia Front-End Integration Center — integrating the front-end components into front-end assemblies and testing all the integrated front-end assemblies before they are delivered to Chile, as well as having built two Front-End Service Vehicles.
The ALMA project began calls for academic research project proposals in late 2011, and Taiwan’s research teams acquired 10 projects in the first year and 14 projects last year, Wang said.
NSC Minister Cyrus Chu (朱敬一) said that because Taiwan would cover about 5 percent of the project’s total cost until 2016, the approval rate of Taiwanese research teams’ proposals for academic research with the ALMA had been about 7 or 8 percent since 2011, showing international recognition of Taiwan’s research and execution abilities.
Taipei on Thursday held urban resilience air raid drills, with residents in one of the exercises’ three “key verification zones” reporting little to no difference compared with previous years, despite government pledges of stricter enforcement. Formerly known as the Wanan exercise, the air raid drills, which concluded yesterday, are now part of the “Urban Resilience Exercise,” which also incorporates the Minan disaster prevention and rescue exercise. In Taipei, the designated key verification zones — where the government said more stringent measures would be enforced — were Songshan (松山), Zhongshan (中山) and Zhongzheng (中正) districts. Air raid sirens sounded at 1:30pm, signaling the
The number of people who reported a same-sex spouse on their income tax increased 1.5-fold from 2020 to 2023, while the overall proportion of taxpayers reporting a spouse decreased by 4.4 percent from 2014 to 2023, Ministry of Finance data showed yesterday. The number of people reporting a spouse on their income tax trended upward from 2014 to 2019, the Department of Statistics said. However, the number decreased in 2020 and 2021, likely due to a drop in marriages during the COVID-19 pandemic and the income of some households falling below the taxable threshold, it said. The number of spousal tax filings rebounded
A saleswoman, surnamed Chen (陳), earlier this month was handed an 18-month prison term for embezzling more than 2,000 pairs of shoes while working at a department store in Tainan. The Tainan District Court convicted Chen of embezzlement in a ruling on July 7, sentencing her to prison for illegally profiting NT$7.32 million (US$248,929) at the expense of her employer. Chen was also given the opportunity to reach a financial settlement, but she declined. Chen was responsible for the sales counter of Nike shoes at Tainan’s Shinkong Mitsukoshi Zhongshan branch, where she had been employed since October 2019. She had previously worked
Labor rights groups yesterday called on the Ministry of Labor to protect migrant workers in Taiwan’s fishing industry, days after CNN reported alleged far-ranging abuses in the sector, including deaths and forced work. The ministry must enforce domestic labor protection laws on Taiwan-owned deep-sea fishing vessels, the Coalition for Human Rights for Migrant Fishers told a news conference outside the ministry in Taipei after presenting a petition to officials. CNN on Sunday reported that Taiwanese seafood giant FCF Co, the owners of the US-based Bumble Bee Foods, committed human rights abuses against migrant fishers, citing Indonesian migrant fishers. The alleged abuses included denying
RSS