Portal:Oceania/Selected article/July, 2010

The Yuan-Tseh Lee Array for Microwave Background Anisotropy, also known as the Array for Microwave Background Anisotropy (AMiBA), is a radio telescope located on Mauna Loa in Hawaii, at 3,396 m above sea level.

AMiBA was initially configured as a 7-element interferometer atop a hexapod mount. Observations at a wavelength of 3 mm (86–102 GHz) started in October 2006, and the detections of six clusters by the Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect were announced in 2008. The telescope is expandable up to 19 elements. AMiBA is the result of a collaboration between the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the National Taiwan University and the Australia Telescope National Facility, and also involves researchers from other universities.

The primary goal of AMiBA is to observe both the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background at multipoles between 800 and 8,000 (corresponding to between 2 and 20 arcminutes on the sky), as well as observing the thermal Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect in clusters of galaxies, which has a maximum decrement around 100 GHz. The telescope only observes at night during good weather, using planets for calibration. List of selected articles