Official News page 6

REAL LIFE NEWS: EVEN LARGER ARRAY OF TELESCOPES

by Hazed

Back in the 1940s astronomers had a brainwave. They figured out that instead of building larger and larger dishes onto telescopes, to receive ever more distant radio signals from space, they could get the same results by building an array of smaller dishes that act together. The result was the Very Large Array, 27 massive dishes that over the years have given us some astonishing glimpses into the cosmos. Built in New Mexico in the 1970s, each dish is 25 feet across. It's an awesome piece of technology that can be "tuned" by moving the dishes relative to each other - they move on railroad tracks.

But times have moved on, and the analog technology that runs the VLA is really out of date now, just like flared trousers, socks with toes in them, and other products of the seventies. It's time to update the VLA.

The plan is not to replace the dishes - there's nothing wrong with them - but to add ultra-sensitive digital recorders, and replace the wiring between the dishes with fiber optics. They are also going to replace the computer, called the correlator, that takes the signals from each dish and figures out how they fit together.

The upgrade should be completed in 2012, at which point the setup will be renamed the Expanded Very Large Array. It will be about ten times as brilliant as the original VLA, sensitive enough "in principle, to detect a signal as weak as a cell phone call from Jupiter," according to Scientific American magazine.

So if aliens are trying to reach us on the phone, we'll have a far better chance of taking the call!

For more info on the VLA and the planned upgrade, see http://www.vla.nrao.edu/.

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