A Telescope The Size Of The Earth

Neil Blender writes "From this article: "Astronomers have fashioned an Earth-sized virtual radio telescope that can distinguish celestial features 3,000 times smaller than the those observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The device, which uses atomic clocks and a custom supercomputer to link together radio dishes on three continents, is the most powerful radio observatory ever, according to scientists." Some parts of the custom supercomputer use linux and IDE RAID."

Comments

Resolution and limits?

[roachmotel3]

I wonder how much longer before we will be able to pick out individual geographic features on remote planets? 3000 times better resolution than hubble might actually give us real views of remote plantets.

I'd love to take a geography class in an astronomy major, discussing the geography of Betelgese-124 ;)

Light Versus Radio Waves

[Tablizer]

AFAIK this technique doesn't work on optical observations.

It is theoretically possible IIRC, but just much tougher than radio waves. The timing is very important to putting the signals back together properly in the computer. Radio waves are less dense than light-waves, and thus you have more tolerence of timing errors.

Thus, someday we may be able to do such with light, but for now it is beyond our technology (except at close range).

Re:Yes, but

[Tablizer]

(* thinking about something akin to being able to see the individual cells on Pathfinder's solar-array *)

Or the Mars Polar Lander debri field. I am curious to know what happend to the bugger, not just speculation.

Re:And immediatly they discovered

[Tablizer]

that we still can't see planets becuase most planets don't have radio stations on them :)

Jupiter does. Some amatures can even detect Jupiter's radio emmissions from home-built radio scopes.

I have read that Jupiter broadcasts more radio noise than the Sun, but don't quote me on this.

BTW, it has no beat and you can't dance to it.