Australia, S Korea create giant telescope

Astronomers in Australia have linked radio telescopes in that country with counterparts in South Korea to create a giant instrument almost 5,000 miles across. The linkup, similar to ones Australia has made with telescopes in Japan and China previously, should provide resolving power about 100 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers said. "This is another step in Australia's ongoing collaboration with Asia in the field of radio astronomy," Philip Diamond, astronomy chief at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, said in a statement. The new linkup involved five telescopes -- two in the Australian state of New South Wales and one near Hobart, in Tasmania -- and two Korean instruments, one in the capital Seoul and another in Ulsan, a city in the southeast of the country, SPACE.com reported. The linked radio dishes observed a galaxy 3.5 billion light-years away known as J0854+2006 for five hours as their data was streamed in real time to Curtin University in Western Australia, where it was processed on the fly with good results, researchers said. "We were observing at a high frequency, which can be challenging for this technique, but the experiment worked extremely well," test organizer Chris Phillips said.