MIT researchers have created a radio telescope the size of the Earth

Scientists from MIT and other institutions around the world have linked up multiple radio telescopes around the world using a method known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). The end result is essentially a telescope that is as big as the Earth. This is not the largest astronomical instrument ever created, the same technique was used to previously create telescope more than two and a half times the diameter of the Earth by linking multiple satellites observatories in space.

MIT researchers have added the capabilities of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), by modifying what used to work as an array into a single radio antenna. The ALMA was given both software and hardware upgrades to make the modifications possible, including an atomic clock and a fiber optic system with the capacity to stream 8 Gbps of data, allowing for a huge leap in the imaging resolutions. The millimeter VLBI networks of the world have got an order of magnitude boost in resolutions.

The capacity of the network has been improved so much, that the level of detail achievable is equal to counting the stitches on a baseball from 12874 kilometers away. The data gathered from radio telescopes around the world is so massive, that it is actually cheaper to fly the data to a central location for processing, instead of sending it over the internet. The data will be flown to one of the few facilities in the world that has the capabilities of processing the vast amount of data, known as the MIT haystack.

One of the immediate objects of interest is a supermassive black hole in the center of our own Milky way galaxy, known as Sagittarius A* as well as the galactic nucleus of a nearby galaxy. Two international teams will be working over the duration of a month to collect the data required to image a black hole, the first such project in the world.

The data collected over the course of a few weeks is expected to take a few months to be processed into an image of a black hole, which the researchers hope will be available by 2018.

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