Imaging stars and their environments at high angular resolution with CHARA/MIRC

Séminaire IPAG de Fabien Baron (Georgia State University), jeudi 6 juin 2013 à 11h00, IPAG seminar room

The CHARA Array is the interferometer with the world’s highest angular resolution in the visible and near-infrared. The Michigan InfraRed Combiner (MIRC), the main imaging instrument of the array can combiner the light of all six CHARA telescopes to deliver detailed images of stars and their environments. To date, CHARA/MIRC has not only imaged the first main-sequence star beyond the Sun, but also the first interacting binaries, the mysterious Epsilon Aurigae, rapid rotators, supergiants, etc. This talk will present how we obtained all these images, describing the instrumental, computational, and scientific challenges we had to face before achieving these results, as well as the lessons learned and what the future holds for CHARA/MIRC.