English

Imagerie des \'etoiles \'evolu\'ees par interf\'erom\'etrie. R\'earrangement de pupille

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2010-03-18 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

Atmospheric turbulence is an important limit to high angular resolution in astronomy. Interferometry resolved this issue by filtering the incoming light with single-mode fibers. Thanks to this technique, we obtained with the IOTA interferometer very precise measurements of the spatial frequencies of seven evolved stars. From these measurements, we performed a blind deconvolution to restore an image of the surface of the stars. Six of the them, Betelgeuse, Mu Cep, R leo, Mira, Chi Cyg and CH Cyg, feature very asymmetrical brightness distributions. On the other hand, the Arcturus data are extremely well fitted with a simple limb-darkened photospheric disc. From the observations of χ\chi Cyg, we show that the star is surrounded by a molecular shell undergoing a ballistic motion. We propose to use the same technique of spatial filtering with single-mode fibers to correct for the effect of turbulence in the pupil of a telescope. Because the pupil is redundant, this technique does require a remapping of the pupil. We developed a dedicated algorithm to show that it was possible to reconstruct images at the diffraction limit of the telescope free of any speckle noise. Our simulations show that a high dynamic range (over 10^6) could be obtained in the visible on an 8 meter telescope. A lab experiment is under construction to validate the concept of this new instrument.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1003.3245,
  title  = {Imagerie des \'etoiles \'evolu\'ees par interf\'erom\'etrie. R\'earrangement de pupille},
  author = {Sylvestre Lacour},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1003.3245},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

PhD Thesis 2007, Universit\'e Paris Diderot [French]