Abstract

Invited Talk - Plenary

Thursday, 18 September 2025, 09:40   (Synagoge - Kuppelsaal / virtual plenum)

ALMA2040 - The cold universe in high definition

Eva Schinnerer
MPIA

Over the past decade, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has revolutionized astrophysics by its unprecedented view of the cold universe with discoveries ranging from the first detailed images of protoplanetary disks to resolving the properties of galaxies well in the epoch of reionization. By the end of the next decade, the science landscape will have changed dramatically as new major observational facilities will have started their operations or have come towards advanced maturity in their scientific outcome. At the same time, ALMA’s current Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade will have been in place for ~10 years, and ALMA itself will have been operational for 30 years.
In this presentation, I will present the science case for a next-generation, radically upgraded ALMA-like facility (‘ALMA2040’) based on a European community-wide effort of ~300 scientists. I will focus on the key scientific drivers that could be uniquely addressed with such a new (sub-)mm interferometer, its synergy with other major astronomical observatories in the 2040’s, and the key technical requirements needed to tackle these ambitious goals. By providing fundamental insights into the cold universe across time and spatial scales, ALMA2040 represents a broad, ambitious scientific vision for the future of interferometric observations in the (sub-)mm range.