Quasars

Quasars




"Quasars reside in a variety of galaxies, from normal to highly disturbed. When seen through ground-based telescopes, these compact, enigmatic light sources resemble stars, yet they are billions of light-years away and several hundred billion times brighter than normal stars."

Astronomers believe that a quasar turns on when a massive black hole at the nucleus of a galaxy feeds on gas and stars.

Soon I will let you know what role they play for life here on Earth and interferometry (for InterpidDreamer in particular.)

Very Long Baseline Interferometry - Fort Davis, Texas

Very Long Baseline Interferometry - VLBI




Fort Davis was named for Jefferson Davis, the Secretary of War at the time the military post was established in 1854. It is the highest town in Texas, at 5,050' above sea level.



e-VLBI - real time data transfer

"Recently it has become possible to connect the VLBI radio telescopes in real-time, while still employing the local time references of the VLBI technique. In Europe, 6 radio telescopes of the European VLBI Network EVN are now connected with Gigabit per second links via their National Research Networks and the Pan-European research network GEANT, and the first astronomical experiments using this new technique have been successfully conducted."

I am not completely innocent in establishing the e-VLBI. There is also an antenna at Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard.

Without the VLBI antennas, we would have a hard time defining an intertial reference frame and thus not have the high accuracy of positioning that we have today. VLBI antennas are used both in astronomy and geodesy.

I have chosen a picture of the VLBI antenna at Fort Davis, Texas because I think this will make Nathanael like that place even more, if possible....:-)