Modern optical astronomy: technology and impact of interferometry

Abstract

The present `state of the art' and the path to future progress in high spatial resolution imaging interferometry is reviewed. The review begins with a treatment of the fundamentals of stellar optical interferometry, the origin, properties, optical effects of turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere, the passive methods that are applied on a single telescope to overcome atmospheric image degradation such as speckle interferometry, and various other techniques. These topics include differential speckle interferometry, speckle spectroscopy and polarimetry, phase diversity, wavefront shearing interferometry, phase-closure methods, dark speckle imaging, as well as the limitations imposed by the detectors on the performance of speckle imaging. A brief account is given of the technological innovation of adaptive-optics (AO) to compensate such atmospheric effects on the image in real time. A major advancement involves the transition from single-aperture to the dilute-aperture interferometry using multiple telescopes. Therefore, the review deals with recent developments involving ground-based, and space-based optical arrays. Emphasis is placed on the problems specific to delay-lines, beam recombination, polarization, dispersion, fringe-tracking, bootstrapping, coherencing and cophasing, and recovery of the visibility functions. The role of AO in enhancing visibilities is also discussed. The applications of interferometry, such as imaging, astrometry, and nulling are described. The mathematical intricacies of the various `post-detection' image-processing techniques are examined critically. The review concludes with a discussion of the astrophysical importance and the perspectives of interferometry.

65 pages LaTeX file including 23 figures. Reviews of Modern Physics, 2002, to appear in April issue

References in corpus (32)

• Detection of an Extrasolar Planet Atmosphere
• Passive irradiated circumstellar disks with an inner hole
• A planet on an inclined orbit as an explanation of the warp in the Beta Pictoris disk
• The Palomar Testbed Interferometer
• A dusty pinwheel nebula around the massive star WR 104
• Astrophysical Quantities of Cepheid Variables Measured with the NPOI
• Spatially Resolved Circumstellar Structure of Herbig Ae/Be Stars in the Near-Infrared
• Deconvolution with correct sampling
• Fringe Visibility Estimators for the Palomar Testbed Interferometer
• A dusty torus around the luminous young star LkHa 101
• The last gasps of VY CMa: Aperture synthesis and adaptive optics imagery
• Mid-infrared interferometry on spectral lines: III. Ammonia and Silane around IRC+10216 and VY CMa
• FU Orionis resolved by infrared long baseline interferometry at a 2-AU scale
• Diffraction-limited 800nm imaging with the 2.56m Nordic Optical Telescope
• The Visual Orbit of iota Pegasi
• Direct multi-wavelength limb-darkening measurements of three late-type giants with the Navy Prototype Optical Interferometer
• The Trispectrum of the 4 Year COBE-DMR data
• The angular diameter of R Doradus: a nearby Mira-like star
• Gliese 569B: A young multiple brown dwarf system?
• QSO hosts and environments at z=0.9 to 4.2: JHK images with adaptive optics
• The angular diameter and distance of the Cepheid Zeta Geminorum
• First images on the sky from a hyper telescope
• A Second Bright Source Detected Near SN1987A
• Diffraction-Limited Imaging and Photometry of NGC 1068
• Adaptive optics imaging of low and intermediate redshift quasars
• Resource Letter TF-1: Turbulence in Fluids
• The Stellar Content Near the Galactic Center
• Bispectrum speckle interferometry observations and radiative transfer modelling of the red supergiant NML Cyg: Multiple dust-shell structures evidencing previous superwind phases
• Snapshot coronagraphy with an interferometer in space
• Adaptive Optics observations of LBQS 0108+0028: K-band detection of the host galaxy of a radio-quiet QSO at z=2
• Keck Adaptive Optics Observations of the Radio Galaxy 3C294: A Merging System at z = 1.786?
• Emission line imaging of QSOs with high resolution

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Differential Astrometry of Sub-arcsecond Scale Binaries at the Palomar Testbed Interferometer
• Helicity sensitive plasmonic teraherts interferometer
• Possibility of Measuring the Width of Narrow Fe II Astrophysical Laser Lines in the Vicinity of Eta Carinae by means of Brown-Twiss-Townes Heterodyne Correlation Interferometry
• Computationally efficient method for retrieval of atmospherically distorted astronomical images
• Phase Referencing and Narrow-Angle Astrometry in Current and Future Interferometers
• Adaptive pupil masking for quasi-static speckle suppression
• Intensity Scintillation and Astronomical Quantum Observation