VERA

Terms

VERA

VERA (VLBI Exploration of Radio Astrometry) is the network of four 20-m radio telescopes located in Japan (Mizusawa, Iriki, Ogasawara, Ishigaki.). The main goal of the VERA project is to construct the detailed map of our Milky Way Galaxy by measuring the precise position of many celestial objects. In order to measure the distances of those objects, the projects have observed a number of maser emission. VERA measured the
precise distance to Orion KL.

ALMA

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in Europe by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and in East Asia by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan. ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.

Reference

• Tomoya Hirota, Mi Kyoung Kim, Yasutaka Kurono, and Mareki Honma, 2014, “A Hot Molecular Circumstellar Disk around the Massive Protostar Orion Source I”, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 782, L28

Acknowledgement

• This research is partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI (Grant Number 21224002, 24540242, 24684011, 25108005 and 25120007) and the ALMA Japan Research Grant of NAOJ Chile Observatory, NAOJ-ALMA-0006.