Alma Kids is a popular science project created by ALMA We all love to see the stars and the Milky Way, and it may be human instinct to appreciate the beauty of nature. Through the site can stimulate the curiosity of children to learn more about the universe.

How many stars are there in the sky? So hard to count? There are really a lot of stars, clear and cloudless night, the human eye should see the stars should have thousands, counted and counted, or incomplete! The glittering stars in the night sky, together with some faint and faint parts, look like a big silver river across the night sky, which has been called the Milky Way since long ago. In other cultures, some people think it is white, very much like a "milk road": "Milky Way! The night sky has been a source of mystery for thousands of years, and the way to understand the mysteries hidden in the night sky has not been successful, after all, how can anyone's eyesight be good enough to study the stars in detail?

In 1608 there was a Dutchman Hans ˙ Lippershey (Hans Lippershey), he invented the "telescope", this instrument can magnify anything seen by the eye. Think about it, if you look directly at Saturn, you should not be able to see much detail, right? It seems that no matter how you look at it, Saturn is just a bright star, right? But if you use a telescope to look at Saturn, you can see that Saturn is surrounded by Saturn's rings and many of Saturn's moons, why?

This is because the telescope is better at collecting light than the human eye, so the telescope can help show us where there are still some fainter stars that we can't see with our eyes. About 400 years ago, the Italian astronomer Galileo designed and built a telescope himself, and then he discovered that the faint, hanging in the night sky seems to flow "Galaxy", in fact, there should be a total of at least a few million stars gathered there, together with the shining light.

Since the telescope, astronomers can finally study the stars more carefully. Gradually, they discovered that each star in the sky, in fact, and our sun is the same! In other words, our sun is just one of the many stars in the universe that can't be counted! Our sun is big, hot and bright, because it is very close to us, compared to the rest of those stars, far away from us.

The large telescopes used to study the universe are placed in a place called an "observatory". The observatory is usually built on top of a high hill where the night is dark and the air is particularly clean.

ALMA, the world's largest observatory, is located on a high mountain. If you compare the heights of all the observatories, the mountain where ALMA Observatory is located is the highest of them all. In addition, ALMA Observatory has a total of 66 telescopes, which can be connected and work together to study how galaxies, stars, and planets are born. The ALMA telescope is not the kind of telescope we see in movies and comic books, but the ALMA telescope is not that kind. So, now you should know "ALMA in the end is not a telescope" the answer to it?ALMA is certainly not just an ordinary telescope, because its function is far more than the general telescope.