In this way, the mul­ti­ple tele­scopes act as a gigan­tic “vir­tu­al” tele­scope whose diam­e­ter is much larg­er than that of any real telescope.
High-res­o­lu­tion, long-base­line opti­cal inter­fer­om­e­ters could rev­o­lu­tionise astro­nom­i­cal imag­ing: here, light from two or more tele­scopes, placed at a cer­tain dis­tance from each oth­er, is com­bined to cre­ate an image of a celes­tial object, such as a star. The images obtained in this way have much fin­er detail than those obtained with each indi­vid­ual tele­scope. In this way, the mul­ti­ple tele­scopes act as a gigan­tic “vir­tu­al” tele­scope whose diam­e­ter is much larg­er than that of any real telescope.