LIINUS/SERPIL: a design study for interferometric imaging spectroscopy at the LBT

Abstract

LIINUS/SERPIL is a design study to augment LBTs interferometric beam combiner camera LINC-NIRVANA with imaging spectroscopy. The FWHM of the interferometric main beam at 1.5 micron will be about 10 mas, offering unique imaging and spectroscopic capabilities well beyond the angular resolution of current 8-10m telescopes. At 10 mas angular scale, e.g., one resolution element at the distance of the Galactic Center corresponds to the average diameter of the Pluto orbit (79 AU), hence the size of the solar system. Taking advantage of the LBT interferometric beam with an equivalent maximum diameter of 23 m, LIINUS/SERPIL is an ideal precursor instrument for (imaging) spectrographs at extremely large full aperture telescopes. LIINUS/SERPIL will be built upon the LINC-NIRVANA hardware and LIINUS/SERPIL could potentially be developed on a rather short timescale. The study investigates several concepts for the optical as well as for the mechanical design. We present the scientific promises of such an instrument together with the current status of the design study.

12 pages, SPIE conference proceeding, Orlando, 2006

References in corpus (6)

• A Close Look at Star Formation around Active Galactic Nuclei
• Radiative Transfer Modeling of Three-Dimensional Clumpy AGN Tori and its Application to NGC 1068
• SINFONI adaptive optics integral field spectroscopy of the Circinus Galaxy
• On the nature of the fast moving star S2 in the Galactic Center
• Diffraction Limited Imaging Spectroscopy of the SgrA* Region using OSIRIS, a new Keck Instrument
• LIINUS/SERPIL: a design study for interferometric imaging spectroscopy at the LBT