Completed in 1980 but operational before then, the VLA was
behind the discoveries of water ice on Mercury; the complex region surrounding Sagittarius A *, the black hole at the core of the Milky Way galaxy; and it helped astronomers identify a distant galaxy already pumping out stars less than a billion years
after the
big bang.
One method looks at dimples in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a glow left
behind by the hot, soupy universe just a few hundred thousand years
after the
big bang.