Such images will be sharper than those produced by the Hubble, whose mirror is a mere 2.4 metres across.

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When he was appointed last November, it was to restore Italy's credibility on international financial markets, whose mirror image is the spread between Italy's benchmark government bonds and their German equivalents.

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This is done using a technique called interferometry, which merges the beams of light in a way that simulates the sharpness (though not the brightness) of the images that would be obtained from a telescope whose mirror was 200 metres across.

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