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 (9)

• Detection of an Extrasolar Planet Atmosphere
• Passive irradiated circumstellar disks with an inner hole
• A dusty torus around the luminous young star LkHa 101
• 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
• Gliese 569B: A young multiple brown dwarf system?
• The angular diameter and distance of the Cepheid Zeta Geminorum
• Adaptive optics imaging of low and intermediate redshift quasars
• Keck Adaptive Optics Observations of the Radio Galaxy 3C294: A Merging System at z = 1.786?

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Heisenberg limited single-mode quantum metrology
• 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