| 摘要: | 研究期間：10108~10207;The Atacama Large Millimeter/Sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) is the largest ground based, international astronomical observational facility ever built. ALMA will be composed of about 70 antennas and is equipped with receivers covering the wavebands from 90GHz to 1 THz. ALMA will open a new window in the observational astronomy, allowing astronomers to probe the mysteries of cosmic origin, such as the first stars and galaxies, the universal cold dark matter, active galaxies, solar and extra-solar planets, and possible traces of life. Because of its unprecedented resolution and collecting power, ALMA is able to detect remarkably faint sub-millimeter and millimeter wavelength emission and to create high-resolution images that cannot be found in any other astronomical instruments and might revolutionize our understanding of the cosmic origin. The Graduate Institute of Astronomy at National Central University has been actively preparing for several different scientific projects to be observed with ALMA. Taiwan has joined the construction of the ALMA and thus provides an opportunity for Taiwanese astronomers to access this world-class instrument. The instruments will be open to all researchers in Taiwan based on peer-review competition among all contributors of ALMA. We expect that this facility will become a significant promoter of astronomical and related researches in Taiwan if ALMA observational proposals from Taiwan are well supported. We (The Graduate institute of Astronomy at National Central University) have very good experience in theories and optical/infrared observations for different kinds of astronomical phenomena, such as solar system objects, variable stars, extra-solar planets, planetary nebulae, active galactic nuclei, merging galaxies, gamma ray bursts, clusters of galaxies, and cosmic dark matter etc. We also have experience in millimeter/sub-millimeter observations for some particular scientific projects, such as merging galaxies and active galactic nuclei. The scientific goals of ALMA match well with current research interests of the optical/infrared/theoretical researches at NCU. We thus like to use this opportunity to extend our horizon of researches from traditional optical/infrared to millimeter/sub-millimeter observations. We have formed an ALMA research team working on proposal writings, data reduction and other technique preparations. Our research team consists of five tenure-faculty members, and two long-term visiting scholars. We have been organizing regular ALMA meeting and discussion and training students to use radio interferometers and ALMA. Because ALMA will generate tremendous amounts of data, we also expect to recruit two postdocs and one computing scientist in helping the data processing and analysis to continue our efforts. Following the schedule of ALMA, we expect to obtain a few original observational results related to the origin of solar systems and galaxy evolution by the end of the first year, and expect to make impact contributions in 2-3 years. By joining the ALMA observations, we also expect that our students will be well trained and become more familiar with the new trend of multi-wavelength observations of astronomical researches. |
