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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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