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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 29 2017, @12:03AM   Printer-friendly
from the when-interference-is-a-good-thing dept.

The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) has captured the best ever image of another star. The VLTI was used to image the surface of Antares, a red supergiant star about 550 light years away in the heart of the constellation Scorpius (The Scorpion):

The VLTI is a unique facility that can combine the light from up to four telescopes, either the 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes, or the smaller Auxiliary Telescopes, to create a virtual telescope equivalent to a single mirror up to 200 metres across. This allows it to resolve fine details far beyond what can be seen with a single telescope alone.

[...] Using the new results the team has created the first two-dimensional velocity map of the atmosphere of a star other than the Sun. They did this using the VLTI with three of the Auxiliary Telescopes and an instrument called AMBER to make separate images of the surface of Antares over a small range of infrared wavelengths. The team then used these data to calculate the difference between the speed of the atmospheric gas at different positions on the star and the average speed over the entire star. This resulted in a map of the relative speed of the atmospheric gas across the entire disc of Antares — the first ever created for a star other than the Sun..

The astronomers found turbulent, low-density gas much further from the star than predicted, and concluded that the movement could not result from convection, that is, from large-scale movement of matter which transfers energy from the core to the outer atmosphere of many stars. They reason that a new, currently unknown, process may be needed to explain these movements in the extended atmospheres of red supergiants like Antares.

Vigorous atmospheric motion in the red supergiant star Antares (DOI: 10.1038/nature23445) (DX)


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 29 2017, @12:50AM (7 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday August 29 2017, @12:50AM (#560613) Homepage
    When I was growing up, all the textbooks and amateur science coffee-table books were saying "no star apart from our own sun has a discernable extent" or suchlike - i.e. that they were all just pointlike. More recently I've seen splats that were wider than a pixel, but there was never any detail. Finally, the image shows differences across the surface - and I'm happy to see another old limit of scientific knowledge be blown out of the water.

    Completion of the quark family trifecta and the Higgs boson, Black holes mergers causing gravity waves, exoplanets everywhere, these are great decades for science.
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday August 29 2017, @03:05AM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday August 29 2017, @03:05AM (#560645) Journal

    I won't start to be satisfied until the JWST comes online and starts making headlines in 2019. We'll also have images from 2014 MU69 at the beginning of that year and hopefully discovery images of Planet Nine followed by JWST's images of it. Sometime between now and later, expect gravitational wave astronomy [sciencealert.com] to become a big deal.

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    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 29 2017, @07:47AM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday August 29 2017, @07:47AM (#560710) Homepage
      Fully agree - there as much excitement possible in the future as there has been the past. I forgot to mention the Hubble by name, that was an amazing leap, or should I say hobble - it was far from a smooth journey, forwards.
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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @05:09PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @05:09PM (#560938)

      Personally, I find JWST disappointing, just because of the timing.

      Sure, it's an amazing feat in lightweight materials and segmented mirrors to pack a whole 6.5m telescope in a 5m diameter, 7 ton package. But with SpaceX's ITS coming online just a few years later, and seemingly able to launch a comparable telescope fully-assembled, with a relatively high-mass/low-cost design... Just think what those billions could have given us, if we'd known this was coming.

      But it really will do some amazing work; I certainly can't complain about its capabilities.

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 29 2017, @07:49PM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday August 29 2017, @07:49PM (#561066) Journal

        Well, SpaceX's possible 2022 ITS to Mars [wikipedia.org] mission seems like an incredibly aggressive timeline. The Red Dragon 2018 Mars mission will be delayed [soylentnews.org]. I wouldn't pin my hopes on SpaceX being able to deliver a bigger-than-Falcon-Heavy payload in the next few years. We haven't even had the first Falcon Heavy [wikipedia.org] launch... that will be in November. What we might have is the Space Launch System... and while it is an eye-watering $500 million per launch, that is not even 10% of what the James Webb Space Telescope will ultimately cost. Admittedly, the JWST budget was a lot smaller in the beginning.

        So it could take SpaceX more than a few years to get ITS going. We expect a big space telescope launch about every decade, so that timing could work out.

        Two proposals are ATLAST [soylentnews.org], which could be anywhere from 8 to 17 meters, and HDST [wikipedia.org] at 12 meters. ATLAST is a cheeky name and both telescopes are considered true successors to the Hubble due to their ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared capabilities. So ATLAST will probably be called HDST and the dream size of ~16 meters will not be realized.

        It would be really nice to see China adopt one of these concepts so that we can get more giant space telescopes up per decade. They are planning to spend billions on their own space station and possibly manned operations on the Moon. One of their goals [wikipedia.org] is to "Improve their standing in the world of space science" and a beyond-Hubble class optical space telescope would definitely help achieve that.

        Sure, it's an amazing feat in lightweight materials and segmented mirrors to pack a whole 6.5m telescope in a 5m diameter, 7 ton package. But with SpaceX's ITS coming online just a few years later, and seemingly able to launch a comparable telescope fully-assembled, with a relatively high-mass/low-cost design... Just think what those billions could have given us, if we'd known this was coming.

        I'm not sure the foldable designs are going away, but I agree that big and cheap would be great. Another approach could be to fly a swarm of telescopes that work together to produce a better image. Five $2 billion telescopes could be a great deal, provide redundancy so that one failure doesn't kill the program, and they can be aimed at separate targets most of the time and come together to focus on a single object say, 20% of the time.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @06:09AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @06:09AM (#560683)

    I saw pics of Betelgeuse from roughly early 80's showing a disk. But, Betelgeuse is a swollen star near the end of life.