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Top Achievements for the NRAO Very Large Array

-- | February 20, 2014

Question: I’m embarrassed to ask this, as I feel after working here for so long I should already know the answer. But here it is: What are the top 3 discoveries/achievements of the VLA? And why? — Doug

Answer: As you can imagine, an actually ranking of the Very Large Array (VLA) achievements would be open to debate. Kind of “beauty in the eye of the beholder” problem. Dave Finley, NRAO Public Information Officer, provided the following links listing what NRAO believes are the VLA’s top scientific achievements:

Twenty Years of Frontier Science with the VLA: A listing of seven scientific highlights produced for the twentieth anniversary of the VLA.
Astronomers Find Enormous Hole in the Universe: Finding a billion light year hole in the universe, or in other words finding literally “nothing”, was big news when this story came out.
Black Holes Lead Galaxy Growth: Answering a fundamental question about galaxy evolution. Which came first, the supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies or the galaxies themselves.

Jeff Mangum

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