In July the European ARC network set up a booth at the annual European Astronomical Society (EAS) meeting, where conference participants could pick up a variety of ALMA related stickers, watch an informative video about ALMA and the ARC network, or enjoy a casual chat with one of the ARC representatives. This was a great opportunity for the ARC network to promote its services to the astronomy community and spread excitement about ALMA science and developments.
In June ESO hosted a workshop focused on ALMA’s upcoming Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU). The workshop, titled “The promises and challenges of the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade”, presented the upgrade and showcased the science that will be enabled in the upcoming years. It was also an opportunity to solicit input from the ALMA community that will be used to inform priorities during the commissioning phase.
In short, the WSU is well-underway and consists of an increase of the instantaneous spectral bandwidth by as much as a factor of four, while retaining full spectral resolution over the entire bandwidth. The result is an increase of the spectral scan speed up to a factor of 50 for the highest spectral resolution. In addition, an upgrade of the full signal chain of ALMA – from the receivers and digitizers, all the way through to the correlated data – will result in increases in sensitivity for all observations.
You can watch a video about the WSU here!
The ALMA Cycle 11 proposal submission statistics set some new records! Although the number of overall submitted proposals seems to be stabilising with 1712 proposals this semester, the number of hours requested on the 12-meter array continues to increase each cycle with over 30000 hours requested this cycle. The region with the highest number of proposals submitted was (again) Europe with a request of 11946 hours on the 12-m array, leading to the highest oversubscription of any region (over 8). East Asia and North America both had oversubscriptions of about 6.5, and Chile saw a big jump up in oversubscription which is now over 5. Band 6 remained the most popular this cycle, and Band 1 was requested by about 10% of proposals in its debut cycle.
The percentages of proposals for the 12-m array per region, science category, and requested receiver band for regular proposals are shown in the figure below.
42 large programs were submitted, of which four were awarded: two in the Circumstellar Disks, Exoplanets, and the Solar System category; and two in the Cosmology and High Redshift Universe category.
In Cycle 11, 60 proposals were submitted from the Netherlands. From these, 16 were accepted with an A, B or C rating. Worldwide, Netherlands-based astronomers were involved in 103 accepted proposals representing close to 2000 hours of ALMA time. This includes 16 researchers as PI and 106 individuals as co-I.
More details on the submission statistics can be found here.
In June the European ALMA regional center organised the first European ALMA school, hosted by the UK regional node in Manchester. The school was a full week of lectures and hands-on activities related to interferometry, and ALMA specifically. Topics ranged from calibration techniques, to the specifics of the products that ALMA delivers, to an overview of the science that’s been done with ALMA over its 10-year lifespan. On top of the lectures, there was a visit to Jodrell Bank Observatory. With about 70 participants, the school was a big success, and we are looking forward to planning similar events in the future!
Allegro will host a training event on 23 October introducing the software packages that are commonly used to work with ALMA data: CASA and CARTA. We will briefly introduce ALMA and Allegro, and start looking at ALMA data using these software packages. The aim of the workshop is to get researchers started using ALMA data, and to point them to the resources they’ll need once they embark on their own projects. The workshop is geared towards first time users of ALMA data.
Please let your students, especially ones starting ALMA-related projects, know about the workshop.
You can express interest using this link.
On January 30, 2024, Allegro – in collaboration with JWST colleagues – organized its first Netherlands JWST-Allegro Science Day at Kapteyn Institute, in Groningen. The Joint Science Day was inspired by the recent introduction of “Joint Proposals” at ALMA and other major observatories and was aimed to inspire collaborations while highlighting already existing scientific synergies.
The event was a great success, with ~ 50 registered participants and an incredible lineup of speakers presenting ALMA, JWST data but also in many cases both in the same talk. Talks ranged from astrochemistry, the high-z universe, to long baseline observations of gravitational lenses, and studies of nearby galaxies and planet forming disks. Invited speakers were Prof. Karina Caputi (Kaptyen) and Dr. Łukasz Tychoniec (Leiden) who spoke about high redshift galaxies and proto-stellar systems, respectively, in both cases demonstrating the power of combining information from both instruments. Dr. Martin Zwaan (ESO) was invited to speak about ALMA news and the Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU) that has recently kicked off, offering a detailed timeline and explanation of upcoming capabilities.
Another great highlight of the day was the opportunity to visit the NOVA labs where the new ALMA Band 2 cartridges are currently being assembled. This was a very exciting opportunity for many students and postdocs to get in touch with the technology being developed in the Netherlands and was an inspirational demonstration of the many contributions from the Dutch community to ALMA. Finally, our Allegro-JWST Science Day was a great way to meet our colleagues from various institutes in person again, to chat over coffee and lunch about new ideas and future visions. We would like to thank Kapteyn for hosting, and all our participants for making it such a fun day!
Allegro’s newest member is Dr. Megan Lewis who joined in February as a postdoc. Megan received her Bachelor’s degree from Vassar College and her Master’s and PhD degrees from the University of New Mexico in the US. While in New Mexico she was also a Reber predoctoral fellow with the NRAO. She then joined the international Araucaria group working at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland as a postdoctoral researcher. Her research interests include evolved stars, the circumstellar environment, and astrophysical masers. Recently, she has been involved with studies of period-luminosity relations, the connections between maser properties and physical properties, and is heavily involved in the BAaDE Galactic SiO maser survey. She will support the ALMA user community by serving as a contact scientist for PIs with ALMA time and offering general services including face-to-face support for the Dutch ALMA community via proposal preparation and data handling.
We would also like to express our gratitude to Dr. Alex Hygate, Dr. Aida Ahmadi, Dr. Ashley Bemis, and Dr. Andrés Pérez Sánchez for their amazing service at Allegro in all aspects. We will miss them greatly, but we wish them all the best for their future endeavors in their career! 
With the upcoming Cycle 11 call for ALMA proposal, Allegro is providing support to ALMA users with the following plans:
Please direct your questions to violette@strw.leidenuniv.nl or alma@strw.leidenuniv.nl
Important dates for ALMA Cycle 11 call (more details from the Cycle 11 Call for Proposals):
In the week of 24 – 28 June, 2024, ESO is hosting a workshop dedicated to discussion of the upcoming Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU) development. The aim of this workshop is to present the upgrade and to engage the community by showcasing the science that will be enabled in the upcoming years, during which some changes to scientific operations are expected due to the extent of the upgrade, deployment, and commissioning activities.
The deadline for registering for in-person participation is 1st May 2024
For more details, please refer to the announcement page
The European ALMA Regional Centre network is organizing an ALMA School that will be hosted by the UK ARC Node on 10 – 14 June 2024 in Manchester, UK. This school is designed to provide training on a broad range of aspects related to ALMA, including interferometry, data calibration and imaging, the ALMA archive, analysis techniques, ALMA science, and future ALMA developments.
For more details please visit the school website.