Extragalactic Astronomy with the VLTI: a new window on the Universe

Abstract

Interferometry in the optical and near infrared has so far played a marginal role in Extragalactic Astronomy. Active Galactic Nuclei are the brightest and most compact extragalactic sources, nonetheless only a very limited number could be studied with speckle interferometry and none with long baseline interferometry. The VLTI will allow the study of moderately faint extragalactic objects with very high spatial resolution thus opening a new window on the universe. With this paper we focus on three scientific cases to show how AMBER and MIDI can be used to tackle open issues in extragalactic astronomy.

arXiv commentinvited contribution, to appear in the proceedings of the JENAM 2002 Workshop WS-VLTI "The Very Large Telescope Interferometer: Challenges for the Future", Editors: P.J.V. Garcia, A. Glindemann, Th. Henning, F. Malbet, Ap&SS, Kluwer, in press

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• The spatially resolved broad line region of IRAS 09149-6206
• The supermassive black hole in Centaurus A: a benchmark for gas kinematical measurements
• Geometric Distances of Quasars Measured by Spectroastrometry and Reverberation Mapping:Monte Carlo Simulations
• Application of the space-based optical interferometer towards measuring cosmological distances of quasars