The largest ever ground-based telescope still under construction in a Chilean mountain released its first image from deep space on Monday showing two colliding galaxies 45 million light-years away from the Milky Way.

The Antennae Galaxies with its distinctive antennae resembling that of an insect's and located in the constellation Corvus was taken by 12 radio antennas of the 66-radio antenna Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) located 5,000 metres high on the Chajnantor plateau in northern Chile.

The image of the two galaxies is the best ever produced so far and it shows lights representing stars and their surrounding cloud of dense cold gas. The total amount of gas is billions of times the mass of the Sun and that is from where future generations of stars will evolve, according to Almaobservatory.org.

"Observations like these open a new window on the submillimeter Universe and will be vital in helping us understand how galaxy collisions can trigger the birth of new stars," said the press release posted on the observatory's website.

As its name says, the ALMA can see invisible light emitted in the millimetre and submillimetre wavelength range, which is roughly one thousand times longer than the wavelengths of light visible to the naked eye. When completed, the combined ALMA radio antennas will be electronically linked to act a single giant telescope with a lens diameter of 6 kilometres. The more antennas used, the higher the resolution of the image is the produced. In contrast, the largest single telescope on Earth is the Large Binocular Telescope in Obs, Arizona, USA with an effective aperture diameter of 12 metres.

Astronomers from around the world will study celestial origins using the ALMA, Spaceref.com quoted John Richer, UK Project Scientist for ALMA based at the University of Cambridge, as saying.

The international scientific community is jointly building the ALMA with the UK as a major investor. British entities involved in the design and construction of the project are the Science and Technology Facilities Council, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and UK Astronomy Technology Centre, the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, the University of Manchester and the University of Kent. Also involved is the European Southern Observatory based in Germany.