A powerful new telescope affording a view of the universe unmatched by most ground-based observatories opened its eyes for the first time Monday deep in Chile's Atacama desert.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a joint project with the United States, European Union, Japan and Chile, officially opened for astronomers after a decade of planning and construction.

ALMA, which is the world's biggest astronomy project, is described as the most powerful millimeter/submillimeter-wavelength telescope in the world and the most complex ground-based astronomy observatory.

The first images were expected this week from 12 of the 66 radio telescopes at the mega-site in Chile's northern Atacama desert.

"Today marks the recognition of the successful coalition of thousands of people from all over the world all working with the same goal: to build the world's most advanced radio telescope to see into the Universe's coldest, darkest places, where galaxies and stars and perhaps the building blocks of life are created.," said ALMA director Thijs de Graauw.

ALMA is different from visible-light and infrared telescopes because it uses an array of linked antennas acting as a single giant telescope, and detects much longer wavelengths than those of visible light, rendering images unlike most others of the cosmos.

ALMA's location provides a unique advantage, because of the extreme aridity of the Atacama and its altitude of 5,000 meters (16,400 feet). It is in the same region as the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), due to begin operation in 2018.

The first images were of the Antennae Galaxies, a pair of colliding galaxies with dramatically distorted shapes some 70 million light-years away in the constellation Corvus.

ALMA's view "reveals something that cannot be seen in visible light: the clouds of dense cold gas from which new stars form," according to ALMA. "This is the best submillimeter-wavelength image ever made of the Antennae Galaxies."

"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."