The December 4 meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute will feature a lecture on the Atacama Large Millimetre Array.

Title: Unveiling the Hidden Universe with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array 

Speaker: Christine Wilson, Ph.D., Department of Physics and Astronomy, McMaster University 

Explore nearby infant stars and young galaxies at the edge of the universe as seen through the radio-eyes of the ALMA telescope, the largest astronomical observatory on the planet.

Atacama Sub-millimetre array courtesy National Geographic

My work involves all aspects of observational star formation and the molecular interstellar medium, both in our own Galaxy and in other galaxies. I am particularly interested in the properties of giant molecular clouds, the nature of the interstellar medium in dwarf galaxies, the mechanisms regulating star formation rates and efficiencies in galaxies, and the properties of low-mass protostars in nearby molecular clouds. A large part of my observational work is concentrated in the regime of millimeter-wave radio interferometry, where high-resolution images of the emission from molecules in the interstellar medium can be obtained. However, many of these problems require a multi-wavelenght approach and so I have used a variety of optical and radio telescopes, including the Submillimeter Array (SMA), the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), and the Herschel Space Observatory .

Dr Christine Wilson, McMaster University