The following Keck Interferometer papers were presented at the 2006 International Society for Optical Engineering conference in Orlando, Florida:
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The Keck Interferometer team achieved a 100:1 null with observations of Vega and two other stars during a recent observing run.
Full story
The Keck Interferometer team has installed and tested a new instrument that can suppress up to 99.9 percent of a star's glare, revealing close-in regions where planets may have formed.
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The Keck Interferometer team's observations of the galaxy NGC 4151, located 40 million light years from Earth, mark the most distant observation ever obtained using an optical/infrared interferometer.
Press release
Astronomers have observed a young star ringed by a swirling disc that may spin off planets, marking the first published science observation using the Keck Interferometer.
Press release
Paper (preprint, PDF format)
The first shared-risk visibility amplitude science observations
were taken in June 2002. The observations included two
high mass young stellar objects and calibrator stars.
The measured visibilities can be used to determine the physical
size scales of the emission regions in the target sources.
NASA has announced the selection of four teams from throughout the United States that will perform shared risk science beginning in early 2002. They are:
- Dr. John Monnier, principal investigator: A study of the inner disks surround very young stars in the Taurus Molecular Cloud.
- Dr. Wesley A. Traub, principal investigator: Circumstellar disk detection with the Keck nuller.
- Dr. Shrinivas R. Kulkarni, principal investigator: Stellar astronomy with the Keck Inteferometer.
- Dr. William C. Danchi, principal investigator: Multi-wavelength visibility observation of circumstellar material with the Keck Interferometer.
The two Keck telescopes were combined for the first time as an interferometer on the night of Monday, March 12. At 10:40 pm HST the first fringe lock was obtained on the star HD 61294.
The telescopes first captured the light from HD 61294, a faint star in the constellation Lynx, then steered the light across the 275-foot space in the basement between the two instruments. The light gathered by each telescopes was combined to equal the resolution of a single, much larger telescope.
In order to properly phase the two telescopes, adaptive optics on both telescopes removed the distortion caused by the Earth's atmosphere. In addition, the optical system adjusted the light path to within a millionth of an inch. The engineering run was an overwhelming success.
