The Essentials

Puerto Rico’s giant Arecibo radio telescope joined five other telescopes around the world April 3 to study a radio source seen as it was just five billion years after the Big Bang, or about eight billion years ago.

The experiment was part of Arecibo’s contribution to the International Year of Astronomy and is one of the events in the IYA’s “100 Hours of Astronomy” project – the largest single science public outreach event ever. Using a technique called “very long baseline interferometry,” telescopes in Italy, the Netherlands, Finland, Spain and Chile will combine their signals with those from Arecibo through a central processor in the Netherlands, and build up a high-resolution image of the radio quasar B0234+285.