130m telescope!?!

Hi All,

News report from the ESO in Chile indicates that they have successfully combined the 4 8m telescopes at Paranal via interferometry to effectively make a 130m telescope. Looking forward to seeing some results from this. The resolution improvement should be significant!

More here:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16869022

Cheers,

Maurice

Thanks for pointing that out, Maurice. Pretty cool that they've pushed interferometry into the visual spectrum--we should see some interesting stuff soon, I'll bet. They claim 50 milliarcsec resolution, within an order of mag of conventional VLBI. But in the last few years VLBI has been pushed down to about 1mm wavelengths, yielding resolution on the order of 10 microarcsec (which blows my mind!); the central black hole in M87 has a size around 4 microarcsec, so pushing VLBI into the submillimeter region would reveal a lot about the structure/formation of the jet. Doelemann's 2008 article in Nature is a good read.