Information Madness

Astronomers have managed to create the world’s largest virtual optical telescope by linking four large telescopes at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. They will operate as a single device. The Paranal Observatory is located some 8,500 feet above the sea level.

The telescopes of this Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory make a virtual mirror that is about four hundred feet in diameter. A previous attempt to link the telescopes had failed in the month of March last year. The link up now has been verified by the system. The scientific work can start.

Linking the four telescopes of the VLT will give scientists a more detailed look at the universe than the previous experiments which involved two or three telescopes to form a virtual mirror.

The process of linking telescopes is known as `interferometry’. The VLT becomes the largest ground based optical telescope on earth in this mode. Interferometry improves the telescopes’ spatial resolution and zooming capabilities in addition to creating a large virtual mirror.

The VLT is one of many telescopes set up by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in the Atacama Desert in Chile. ESO is an international research organization with its headquarters in Munich. It is sponsored by fifteen countries.

The telescopes have been set up on a desert mountain top. Now, the scientists are likely to observe things that they were not able to observe before. Prepare yourself to discover more planets now. As it is, so many new planets have cropped up in the discoveries in the past couple of years.