Hertford Astrophysicist for President

6 January 2015

On January 1, Hertford fellow Professor Pat Roche, Tutor in Physics, assumed the Presidency of the Council of the European Southern Observatory, ESO and also took over as Chair of the ALMA  Board, the governing body of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array.

ESO is an intergovernmental organisation which builds and operates the foremost astronomical observatories on Earth. The observatories are located on three main sites in the Atacama desert in Chile, where the dry conditions and clear skies provide outstanding observing conditions. The ALMA observatory is located at an altitude of 5000m in the Chilean Altiplano, exploiting the extremely low water content  in the thin atmosphere above the site, and is a global observatory opening up the cold Universe to detailed study for the first time. A fourth mountain top, Cerro Armazones, is being levelled in preparation for the next major telescope, the imaginatively named European Extremely Large Telescope, which will be the most powerful facility of its kind once its 39-m diameter primary mirror swings into action after its decade long construction period.