Alma telescope peers into space from Chile's mountains

[CrispyQ]

2. Love this stuff!

The dishes can be moved across the plateau like pieces on a giant chess board. Each one weighs 100 tonnes.

The engineers use two massive yellow trucks to haul them into place.

Sometimes the dishes are placed right next to each other. At other times they are up to 15km apart.

Their positioning determines which part of the universe they point toward.

The dishes then work in unison, detecting radio waves from outer space. The waves are converted into data by a super-computer, as powerful as three million laptops, and that data is sent to Alma's operations centre down the mountainside in the relative warmth at 2,900m.