"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. "The resolution achieved by this telescope is the equivalent of sitting in New York and being able to see the dimples on a golf ball in Los Angeles," astronomer Sheperd Doeleman said this week. " I don't know why amateurs don't do this using C-band dishes and distributed computing. CNN.com - New telescope as big as Earth itself - Oct. 2, 2002 |