Thanks to the radio interferometry technique, we are developing an affordable interferometer system to simultaneously use many radio telescopes and obtain high resolution radio maps of radio sources in the universe. This behavior can be understood by visualizing the interferometer fringes over a range of wavelengths In very long baseline interferometry (vlbi) radio telescopes separated by thousands of kilometers are combined to form a radio interferometer with a resolution which would be given by a hypothetical single dish with an aperture thousands of kilometers in diameter.
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The high angular resolution of radio telescopes is achieved by using the principles of interferometry to synthesize a very large effective aperture from a number of antennas.
Radio telescope arrays are heterodyne, meaning incoming radiation is interfered with a local oscillator signal before detection
The signal can then be amplified and correlated with signals from other telescopes to extract visibility measurements. A radio interferometer measures the interference pattern (fringes) produced by pairs of apertures The complex visibility, v(u,v) is the 2d fourier transform of the brightness on the sky.
