Most of the universe is cold, said Paul Ho, an SMA project scientist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. And much of what astronomers would like to study is obscured by cold dust.

Ho rapped on a table and said it's as if astronomers have been studying tables but can only see the fronts of them.

"If the eyeballs are tuned properly, they can see the front of the table and everything behind it," Ho said. That everything might include a central star, or perhaps fledgling planets or other objects that are developing around a star.

So the array should be able to produce 3-D views of dust clouds and their contents, Ho said. This would provide views of distant solar systems in the earliest stages of formation.

"The SMA will allow us to peer into regions that are obscured at optical and infrared wavelengths to study low-energy emissions from cold dust and molecules," said James Moran, director of the project at the Harvard-Smithsonian center.

By combining the efforts of the separate antennas, the array serves effectively as one giant telescope that will be 1,600 feet in diameter once it is fully operational. The technique, called interferometry, blends the light of all the telescopes at one central receiving station. The result is not typically a traditional image, but rather a set of graphs that reveal the shape and nature of distant objects.

One early observation shows previously hidden details at the center of a dust-ridden galaxy called NGC 253. More significant observations will come once all eight antennas are online in 2003.

Studying space in the submillimeter wavelength will actually allow researchers to look at two very different things. While it will open a new window to the "cold" universe of dust, it will also reveal details of very high-energy phenomenon, said Moran.

Researchers plan to exploit that duality by getting the closest looks ever at the energetic regions around black holes, where matter disappears forever, said Jun-Hui Zhao, also of the Harvard-Smithsonian center.

The observatory is also expected to provide new views of the atmosphere and weather of planets and moons in our solar system.

Interferometry was pioneered with radio telescopes, including the Very Large Array in New Mexico. Recently, optical telescopes have begun to employ the technique to get better views of regular old stars.

The Submillimeter Array was proposed in 1984. Construction began in 1995. It is operated by Harvard-Smithsonian center in cooperation with the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan.

The site atop Mauna Kea was chosen because it is one of the few that sits above most of the obscuring water vapor in Earth's atmosphere. Other large telescopes are located there, including Gemini North and the Keck Observatory pair.

Two other submillimeter arrays are also already in service atop the desolate, 13,792-foot peak: the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. Beginning in 2005, these two observatories will be used in conjunction with the more powerful new SMA to create even greater capabilities.

Full Coverage of the 2002 AAS Meeting