Astronomy Picture of the Day

Explanation: They are so large, they are almost unreal. The radio dishes of the Very Large Array (VLA) of radio telescopes might appear to some as a strange combination of a dinosaur skeleton and common satellite-TV receiving dish. Together, the 27 dishes of the VLA combine high sensitivity with high resolution, enabling a series of important astronomical discoveries, including water ice on planet Mercury, micro-quasars in our Galaxy, gravitationally-induced Einstein rings around distant galaxies, and radio counterparts to cosmologically distant gamma-ray bursts. Pictured above, a dish from the VLA was photographed last week near Socorro, New Mexico, USA.

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Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (USRA)
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Publications with keywords: VLA - radiotelescope
Publications with words: VLA - radiotelescope
See also:

• The Very Large Array Turns Twenty
• Sundogs over the VLA
• The Very Large Array of Radio Telescopes
• Arecibo: The Largest Telescope
• Radio, The Big Ear, And The Wow! Signal
• The 76 Meter Lovell Radio Telescope
• The 100 Meter Green Bank Radio Telescope

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