Very Large Array (VLA)
A radio interferometer located near Socorro,
New Mexico. It consists of 27 dish antennas,
each 25 meters in diameter and weighing 230 tons, spaced along a Y-shaped
track with two arms 21 km long and the other 18.9 km long. It was well established
that the VLA had the resolving power to
produce radio images of circumstellar dust
disks but, until 1993, it had no receivers that could operate at the
required wavelength. Such receivers were installed in 1993 and 1994 on 13
of the antenna, enabling the VLA to show 10 times more detail in this part
of the spectrum than any previous observations. The VLA has the resolution
of a single antenna 36 km across and the sensitivity of a dish 130 m across.
Related category
• OBSERVATORIES
AND TELESCOPES
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