By tying together the observational power of three radio telescopes, astronomers have made the sharpest observation of a distant galaxy, some two million times sharper than human vision. That’s big news in an of itself, but it’s even bigger news for astronomers pursuing next-level Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). The observation demonstrates a kind of telescopic collaboration that’s never been seen before, hinting at the future of astronomical observation.
VLBI is a means of linking telescopes together in a way that basically creates a single huge telescope as large as the distance between the telescopes (there’s a good primer on VLBI in our previous coverage of the Event Horizon Telescope, which aims to use VLBI to create a virtual telescope the size of planet Earth).
via Popular Science
