Abstract
Optical Long Baseline Interferometry provides unrivalled angular resolution on bright and compact astrophysical sources. The link between the observables (interferometric phase and contrast ) and the image of the source is a Fourier transform expressed first by van Cittert and Zernike . Depending on the source size and the amount of information collected, the analysis of these Fourier components allows a measurement of the typical source size, a parametric modelling of its spatial structures, or a model-independent image reconstruction to be carried. In the past decades, optical long baseline interferometry provided fundamental measurements for astronomy (ex. Cepheids distances, surface-brightness relations) as well as iconic results such as the first images of stellar surfaces other than the Sun. Optical long baseline interferometers exist in the Northern and Southern hemisphere and are open to the astronomical community with modern level of support. We provide in this chapter an introduction to the fundamental principles of optical interferometry and introduce the currently available facilities.
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Notes
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An illustrative example of coherent source is an hypothetical object made of two fibres fed by the same laser source. The two individual emitters of this “object” do have strong mutual coherence .
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Aspro2 : http://www.jmmc.fr/aspro
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SearchCal : http://www.jmmc.fr/searchcal
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PIONIER data reduction: http://www.jmmc.fr/pndrs
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LITpro http://www.jmmc.fr/
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OiDb: http://www.jmmc.fr/oidb
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Acknowledgements
The participation of JBLB to the workshop that led to this book was supported by OSUG@2020 ANR-10-LABX-56.
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Le Bouquin, JB. (2016). Optical Long Baseline Interferometry. In: Boffin, H., Hussain, G., Berger, JP., Schmidtobreick, L. (eds) Astronomy at High Angular Resolution. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 439. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39739-9_4
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