The Megascope

Radio telescopes in Australia and South Korea have linked up for the first time, forming a mega-instrument roughly 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) across.

The transcontinental scope should have roughly 100 times more resolving power than NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, researchers said. It continues Australia's astronomy partnership with Asia; the country has also made similar linkups with Japan and China over the years.

"This is another step in Australia's ongoing collaboration with Asia in the field of radio astronomy," Philip Diamond, astronomy chief at Australia's national science agency, known as CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), said in a March 15 statement.

Five telescopes were involved in the new linkup. Three of them are Australian, two in the state of New South Wales and one near Hobart, in Tasmania. The two Korean scopes are in the capital, Seoul, and Ulsan, a city in the southeast of the country, researchers said.

The five radio dishes observed the same target — a galaxy 3.5 billion light-years away known as J0854+2006 — simultaneously for five hours. Their data was streamed in real time, at a rate of 64 megabytes per second, to Curtin University in Western Australia, where it was processed on the fly.

Researchers were pleased with the results.

"We were observing at a high frequency, which can be challenging for this technique, but the experiment worked extremely well," said CSIRO's Chris Phillips, who organized the tests.