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A Telescope as Big as the Earth
Roland Piquepaille writes "A week ago, seven telescopes around the world were linked together to watch a distant galaxy called 3C273 in real time and create a single world telescope. The data from these telescopes, which are located in Australia, China and Europe, was streamed around the world at a rate of 256 Mb per second. One of the Australian researchers involved in the project said that it was the first time that astronomers have been able to instantaneously connect telescopes half a world apart. He added that 'the diameter of the Earth is 12,750 km and the two most widely separated telescopes in our experiment were 12,304 km apart.'"
...all data from the Shanghai telescope was filtered and replaced with promotional material for the Peoples Republic of China. Apparently the galaxy bears a striking resemblance to Chairman Mao.
This technique is being used.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
Wow! And I thought SCT's had a large central obstruction.
/.
Ok. That might be the geekiest joke in the histroy of
:(
It would make a great plugin for google earth. Instead of zooming in on earth from space, you could zoom into space from earth.
I for one, welcome our giant eyed, galactic..... I soviet Russia, the world telescopes ....
Scientist can finally peer deep into goat.....
be gentle.
If I went around claiming I was an emperor...they'd put me away!
> A week ago, seven telescopes around the world were linked together to watch a distant galaxy called 3C273 in real time and create a
> single world telescope.
Not to be overly pedantic, but the data were streamed from all over the world to a location in Europe, then processed, and then streamed to China for viewing.
Even though they weren't going over the public net, that's still almost certainly >1000ms latency. Harldy "real time".
Although, I suppose that's acceptable on top of the two and a half years it took for the photons to get to us.
I think I would rather have one high altitude large aperture 'scope looking at an object all night rather than two at the opposite sides of the world. The ones on the opposite sides of the world won't be able to look for long before one of them disappears over the horizon. Not only that but they are looking through the maximum amount of atmosphere.
This stunt is a technical accomplishment but maybe not that important in and of itself. What would get me excited would be a couple of orbiting 'scopes.
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of these!
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
This is in the radio range, not the optical range. The summary misled me to thinking it was in the optical range, which would be an impressive achievement, indeed! The news of this story is that it was done in real-time, over a network connection, instead of by shipping data from each radio telescope site on hard-drives to a location be processed later.
One of the Australian researchers involved in the project said that it was the first time that astronomers have been able to instantaneously connect telescopes half a world apart.
This is the real story - FTL communications!
We have problems on earth, but most of them will never be solved. Poverty will always exist. Stupidity will always exist. So will criminality, alcoholism, drug addiction, and failure. We can either spend our time obsessing over the negative, or we can choose to explore space and find a new future. I'm glad that we continue to probe space, to consider sending up ships, and most all, that we keep space exploration alive in our minds as a source of hope.
technical writing / development
So, when measuring the distance between each of the telescopes, did he do it through the planet (diameter), or did he measure the distance across the surface of the planet (circumference)? Cause that kind makes a huge difference, and really screws up any valid comparison between the two distances.
~Sticky
/You know, kind of like comparing English furlongs and Australian wallabies. Just way too different.
Just seconds after the feeds started the galaxy imagery was somehow lost and replaced with the standard BSOD screen.
Actually light from the closest know star takes about 8 minutes to get to the earth.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
To give you an idea how boring the videos would be, the jets coming out the top and bottom are 200,000 light-years long. That means the galaxy hasn't so much as wobbled for over 200,000 years.
Because as I recall, Beowulf killed Grendel's mother. During the whole story of Beowulf, he is never defeated, though he does die of his wounds after defeating the dragon.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
...because their 52kb/s upload from Comcast just didn't cut it.
The good news is that 94% of every human being who has ever lived is now dead.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I mean, what they observed already happened long ago. We're just observing it now, and that's fine, but theoretically they could just each independantly observe, timedcode, and then sync it all up later.
Its not like it was a live event where you had to have it just then.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Just to expand on this comment for other readers, any time you do this with any kind of wavelength, you have to have the positions of the telescopes known within fractions of a wavelength. Radio waves range from meters to millimeters, so precision on a worldwide scale is difficult but not impossible at this range , although doing it in real-time is still an impressive feat, as this used to be done by recording the signals to tape, taking them to a central location and processing the data then.
However, expanding it to optical frequencies (where you can pick up different types of objects and also do so to much higher resolution) is difficult, since the wavelengths are around 500 nanometers, a level of precision that is still impossible on worldwide scales, except maybe in space, where you can depend on laser range finding over very long distances, although i don't know of any proposals trying to do this over very large scale.
"The data from these telescopes, which are located in Australia, China and Europe, was streamed around the world at a rate of 256 Mb per second"
This means that over 10 seconds 2560Mb of data would be streamed, according to NASA.
$8.95/mo web hosting
"Quasar" is short for "Quasi-stellar object" which is what they were called when they were first discovered. At the time, they were unresolved sources a bit like, but clearly not, stars. Since then it has been discovered that quasars are one form of active galaxy, where accretion onto the black hole in the nucleus of the galaxy releases a lot of energy. So in this sense "galaxy" is accurate. If someone wants to specifically talk about the rest of the galaxy outside the nucleus they use the words "host galaxy".
These sorts of long-baseline radio observations are aimed at mapping the jets released from the nucleus, which are the source of the radio emission. Longer baselines means getting to see closer to the source of the jets (the black hole).