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Interferometer Spots Galaxy at 40M Lightyears

Posted by michael on from the i-spy dept.

techno-vampire writes "JPL announces that a pair of telescopes used as an optical interferometer have detected a galaxy 40 million light years away, smashing the previous record of 3,000 light years. This feat, using infrared, has given us a far more detailed look into the center of a galaxy, and opened up a whole new field of research."

2 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hubble Deep Field Images? by orkysoft · · Score: 5, Informative
    NGC 4151 is 40 million light years from Earth, far beyond the most distant object previously detected by this type of telescope system, which was about 3,000 light years from Earth.

    Ah, that explains.

    --

    I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
  2. Re:Hubble Deep Field Images? by lookingup · · Score: 5, Informative

    The important point here is that they were able to use the two Keck "big guns" together to simulate the resolution of a much bigger telescope. Until recently, only bright stars were bright enough to make these sort of observations. The Keck and ESO interferometers are light-years ahead both because of their large mirrors and because they're using advanced image correction via small, flexible mirrors to correct for the distortion caused by our atmosphere. This makes the light train much more coherent and makes it much easier to get good interference patterns. Therefore they can observe much fainter objects.