The ability to construct large telescopes for a fraction of the usual cost could transform astronomy.
By way of warning, the Science and Environment desk's entry will be the "Unfeasibly Large Telescopes", so that one is taken.
One such study aims to analyse the enormous amounts of data logged during digital surveys of the whole sky using large telescopes.
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Large telescopes are desirable both because they collect more light (and can therefore see fainter objects), and because they can disentangle the images of things that are too close together to be separated by smaller ones.
We never know when exactly it's going to get very bright and this time it was kind enough to do just that when we had a very large number of telescopes trained on it.
The team went on to use data from a range of other telescopes including the Very Large Telescope, the Two Micron All-Sky Survey and the Spitzer space telescope - each of which sees in a particular set of colours, in turn evidencing stars of varying ages.
In theory, to unscramble the signal completely you need two things: good computers and, not so easy, a second infinitely large surface, this time covered with radio telescopes.
The Very Large Array (VLA) is a bank of radio telescopes in New Mexico, US, and has appeared in a number of films including Contact and Independence Day.
Rather than being single instruments with large, lone mirrors, each of these new devices consists of several small interconnected telescopes, whose images are combined using a technique called interferometry.
At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world's most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes.
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