Arecibo joins global network to create 6,000-mile telescope (Forwarded)

Press Relations Office
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York

Media Contact:
Lauren Gold, (607) 255-9736

June 6, 2008

Arecibo joins global network to create 6,000-mile telescope
By Lauren Gold

On May 22, Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico joined other telescopes in
North America, South America, Europe and Africa in simultaneously observing
the same targets, simulating a telescope more than 6,800 miles (almost
11,000 kilometers) in diameter.

The telescopes are all members of the Express Production Real-time e-VLBI
Service (EXPReS) project, and May 22 marked a live demonstration of their
first four-continent, real-time, electronic Very Long Baseline
Interferometry (e-VLBI) observations.

VLBI uses multiple radio telescopes to simultaneously observe the same
region of sky -- essentially creating a giant instrument as big as the
separation of the dishes. VLBI can generate images of cosmic radio sources
with up to 100 times better resolution than images from the best optical
telescopes.

The results were immediately transmitted to Belgium, where they were shown
as part of the 2008 Trans-European Research and Education Networking
Association Conference.

The Arecibo team called the demonstration a major milestone in the
telescope's e-VLBI participation, with a data-streaming rate to the central
signal processor at the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) in the
Netherlands four times higher than Arecibo had previously achieved.

"These results are very significant for the advance of radio astronomy,"
said JIVE director Huib Jan van Langevelde. "It shows not only that
telescopes of the future can be developed in worldwide collaboration, but
that they can also be operated as truly global instruments."

EXPReS, funded by the European Commission, aims to connect up to 16 of the
world's most sensitive radio telescopes to the JIVE processor to correlate
VLBI data in real time. This replaces the traditional VLBI method of
shipping data on disk and provides astronomers with observational data in a
matter of hours rather than weeks, allowing them to respond rapidly to
transient events with follow-up observations.

Cornell's National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center manages Arecibo
Observatory for the National Science Foundation.