Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bkloppenborg 2317 days ago
Betelgeuse is ~47 milliarcseconds in diameter, making it one of the largest stars (in angular diameter terms) observable from Earth. It was first resolved using the Michelson Stellar Interferometer (which had a diameter of 20 meters) in the 1880s.

I don't know the observational wavelength for the images in the article (VLT-SPHERE has filters that go from ~1-2 microns), but if the image were in H-band (1.6 micron wavelength) the resolution of the 8.2 meter telescope is ~49 milliarcsecond, putting this image just at the formal resolution limit. Still, quite impressive stuff.

1 comments

Man, I don't know how to feel about this information: resolved imaging of stellar disks is from the 1880??!

So from the list on wikipedia, I guess they could just do that one star, and didn't learn very much beyond the radius?

What's the hottest results in the field of spatially resolved stellar observations?

The measurement was apparently made in 1920, not 1880s. Still surprising.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson_stellar_interferomet...