Networked telescope almost as big as the earth

Opinion
Sep 14, 20071 min

An Australian research outfit says it has linked one of its radio telescopes to others in China and Europe in real-time, “creating a telescope almost as big as the earth.”

The telescopes streamed data around the world at a rate of 256Mbps, a vast improvement over an old technique dubbed VLBI (very long baseline interferometry) that could take weeks or months to distribute data.