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Session 30 - Radio Astronomy, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow - I.
Oral session, Tuesday, June 11
Union Theater,
The Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland-Association (BIMA) Millimeter Wavelength Array is currently operating with nine 6m antennas with baselines up to 1.2km. As a result, it achieves both a large dynamic range in scale sizes and high angular resolution. Three arrays of successively greater extent provide resolutions at 100 GHz of 5, 2, and 0.4 arc seconds. Combining observations in all three yields a map of 0.4 seconds resolution over the primary field of 120 seconds, a large range in scale sizes. Operation is expected by next winter up to 270 GHz, where the best resolution will be about 0.15 arc seconds, comparable to that of HST. The instrument is used for research in a variety of areas, including both low and high mass star formation, the sun, the solar system, structure of molecular clouds, astrochemistry, the structure and composition of red giant envelopes, the structure of the ISM in other galaxies, the short wave distribution of brightness in radio galaxies, and the distributions of continuum emission and molecular gas in galaxies at high redshift. We will discuss examples of recent results in most of these areas.
