A Telescope as Big as the Earth 172
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.'"
Real time? (Score:3, Insightful)
> 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.
OK (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
A source of hope (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wrong it is not 4.22 years. (Score:4, Insightful)