jhh@ihldt.UUCP (John Haller) (12/12/83)
The following excerpt from the Sunday Tribune paper: Telescope can help solve mystery of black holes By Al Rossiter Jr. Blacksburg, Va [UPI] ... The United States plans to construct a radio telescope with dimesions comparable to the width of Earth. It will consist of an array of 10 82-foot diameter telescopes from Puerto to Hawaii that will operate as one instrument. Antennas also will be in Washington state, southern California, Texas, Arizona, two in New Mexico, Illinois or Iowa and Massachusetts. Specific locations have not been selected. The new telescope assembly, called the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) will be distributed so the Earth's rotation will allow the array to produce radio images equivalent to that obtained by a radio telescope 5,000 miles in diameter. Broderick, associate professor of physics at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, said the array will be able to resolve objects a thousand times better than the best ground-based optical telesopes. [Material deleted] Because of the great distances between the 10 antennas in the array, they will not be connected by data links. Atomic clocks will be used to synchronize the signals as they are received, and these signals will be recorded on magnetic tape. The tapes will be sent to a central processing center - at an undetermined site - where the signals will be simultaneously replayed, correlated in a special computer system far faster than the best commercial computers and converted into images. The array will be built by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, headquarted in Charlottesville, Va., with fincial support from the government's National Science Foundation. The foundation is seeking funds in the fiscal 1985 budget to begin the $60 million project. [Material deleted] Broderick said the VLBA will be able to begin answering the many questions about quasars. Existing radio telescopes have given tantalizing glimpses of quasars, but the images are distorted because of an inadequate number of antennas and lenght of their separation. [Material deleted]