A 6,000 Mile Telescope

May 22 marked a live demo of the first four-continent, Very Long Baseline Interferometry observations.

“VLBI uses multiple radio telescopes to simultaneously observe the same region of sky. Essentially creating a giant instrument as big as the separation of the dishes. VLBI can generate images of cosmic radio sources with up to 100 times better resolution than images from the best optical telescopes.”

They are using the whole Earth as a container for a very, very big radio telescope. Hopefully there will be some very interesting results out of this arrangement in the near future.

Arecibo joins global network to create 6,000-mile telescope