Very Long Baseline Interferometry

The data for this project are produced by the Long Baseline Array (LBA), operated by CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility in partnership with University of Tasmania and Auckland University of Technology. The LBA is the only Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) array in the Southern Hemisphere and comprises telescopes distributed across Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, occasionally partnered by telescopes in China and Korea. Pawsey supercomputing resources are used to combine the simultaneously acquired signals from each of the telescopes to produce images of the sky with a resolution of approximately 1 milliarcsecond (100 times better than that of the Hubble Space Telescope). This technique can be used to address a wide range of scientific questions, and will play an important role in the activities of the Square Kilometre Array.