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Optical astronomy

The resolution revolution

Nature volume 407, pages 462–463 (2000)Cite this article

Astronomers are fond of ‘standard candles’ — objects, such as supernovae or Cepheid variable stars, whose brightness is related in a predictable way to their true distance from us. On page 485 of this issue, Lane et al.1 report the first unambiguous detection of the pulsating diameter of a Cepheid variable star. The observations were made using the Palomar Testbed Interferometer and exploit the continuing revolution in telescope resolution to attempt to answer one of the hottest questions in extragalactic astronomy: how big is the Universe?

An interferometer combines the light from two or more widely spaced mirrors, resulting in an array with the same resolution as a single large telescope of the same diameter as the separation between the mirrors. So radio astronomers using the Very Long Baseline Array are able to simulate a single radio telescope the size of North America. Unfortunately, most stars emit radiation at optical rather than radio wavelengths, and technical obstacles have prevented optical telescopes being built on this scale. The Palomar Testbed Interferometer (PTI), located on Palomar Mountain in California, has the resolving capability of a single 110-metre infrared telescope — much larger than any single telescope built so far, and good enough to resolve stars as small as a few milliarcseconds in diameter3.

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Figure 1: Getting up close and personal to a star.

References

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  1. US Naval Observatory Flagstaff Station, PO Box 1149, Flagstaff, 86001, Arizona , USA

    Tyler Nordgren

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  1. Tyler Nordgren
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Correspondence to Tyler Nordgren.

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Nordgren, T. The resolution revolution. Nature 407, 462–463 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35035186

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