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Global Internet Telescope Tops Hubble's Resolution

Posted by timothy on from the peer-to-peer-peering dept.

satorchi writes " The Arecibo Observatory together with the European VLBI Network have used the internet to make a real-time transatlantic synthesis telescope. Data from the individual telescopes was transfered via the internet, and processed in real time by the central processing station at the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe. 9 terabits were transfered during the 20 hour experiment, and the resulting synthesised telescope had a resolution of 20 milliarcseconds, about 5 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This level of detail is equivalent to picking out a small building on the surface of the Moon!"

5 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Does this mean by The_Mr_Flibble · · Score: 5, Interesting

    we can look for the place where the moon landings took place to finaly debunk all those sceptics ?

  2. 9 TB / 20 hours by mirko · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How heavily has this impacted the transatlantic Internet communications, during these 20 hours ?

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    Trolling using another account since 2005.
  3. Costs by tcdk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Does anybody have an idea about the cost of such a telescope (if you where to build a new one) compared to the Hubble?

    Maybe a space based replacement for Hubble isn't needed...

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    TC - My Photos..
  4. This is not a replacement for Hubble by Animaether · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The title of this story is stupendously moot. It's like saying "oil tanker carries more weight than freight train". Yes, I'm sure it does. It also doesn't go across land.

    Very similarly, this is an antenna (radio astronomy) not a telescope (optical astronomy).

    Even if it were a telescope, it would still be limited by atmospheric distortions (hence why you'd want one in space).

    And even if it were a telescope in space, you'd probably end up with WEBB - which lacks sensors in many of the ranges that Hubble does cover.

    All of the above lead up to at least two results...
    1. Less scientific data

    and, arguably more important as it drives the public's opinion/enthusiasm/taxpaying-willingness/etc.

    2. Far less pretty pictures.

    I suggest doing a search for Hubble on Slashdot and reading the +5 Insightful/Informative posts, as many of them go into detail as to why many of the proposals simply aren't a replacement for Hubble, and why it either should stay up - or a proper replacement be built.

  5. An integrating idea. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Suppose that you wanted to detect a very faint object. You could aim your telescope at a given point in the sky for a couple of hours each night. You could integrate the image over a six month period. That should give you a baseline of 186 million miles never mind a paltry couple of thousand miles.

    One of my favorite experiments is to take a sine wave buried under about 20 dB of noise. By integrating over a long enough period, the signal emerges beautifully. (of course it has zero bandwidth) The neat thing about this is that your detector only has to resolve one bit; you still get a nice sine wave out. This should work for detecting dim stars and I'd be suprised if they didn't do it. Do they? Any astronomers out there?