View of the starry sky from the site of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Cerro Paranal (credit: Yuri Beletsky/ESO)

The European Southern Observatory (Eso) has linked up its four telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory to form a virtual mirror of 130m (424ft) in diameter that will give scientists a much more detailed look at the Universe.

The process that links separate telescopes together is known as interferometry. Besides creating a gigantic virtual mirror, interferometry also greatly improves the telescope’s spatial resolution and zooming capabilities. In this mode, the VLT becomes the biggest ground-based optical telescope on Earth.

[ BBC News ]