High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Very Large Array (VLA) is a radio astronomy observatory located on the Plains of San Agustin, between the towns of Magdalena and Datil, some fifty miles (80 km) west of Socorro, New Mexico, USA. The VLA has made key observations of black holes and protoplanetary disks around young stars, discovered magnetic filaments and traced complex gas motions at the Milky Way`s center, probed the Universe`s cosmological parameters, and provided new knowledge about the physical mechanisms that produce radio emission.