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Infrared Fringe Tracker for the CHARA Interferometer. Monnier and collaborators Theo ten Brummelaar (Georgia State University/CHARA Array) and Rafael Millan-Gabet (Michelson Science Center, Caltech) recently received a 4-year NSF grant to build a "fringe tracker" for CHARA. A fringe tracker is a kind of adaptive optics for interferometry, allowing atmospheric turbulence to be corrected in realtime. This capability will allow imaging using MIRC (see below) for much fainter targets (such as Young Stellar Objects) and will permit high signal-to-noise searches for the near-infrared emission from the "hot Jupiter" class of extra-solar planets.
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Michigan Infra-Red Combiner (MIRC). Monnier and his group are designing and building an infrared combiner for the CHARA Interferometer in collaboration with researchers at Georgia State University. Eventually, this instrument will allow all 6 telescopes of the CHARA array to be used for true interferometric imaging with milliarcsecond resolution. We are particularly interested in using MIRC to map circumstellar disks around young stars and to search for infrared emission from "hot Jupiter" planets around nearby stars.
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Circumstellar Disks in Young Stellar Objects (YSOs). Working with the IOTA and Keck Interferometers, Monnier and his group are measuring the sizes and shapes of disks around YSOs. The 3-telescope IOTA Interferometer can make crude images of the largest YSOs, while the Keck Interferometer project is surveying a larger number of sources in order to understand how the size of the dusty disk varies according to the luminosity of the young star onto which it is accreting. This work is part of larger collaborations involving researchers at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Caltech, Michelson Science Center, NASA-JPL, U. Massachusetts (Amherst), and Grenoble Observatory (France).
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Aperture Masking Interferometry. While current optical interferometer arrays still struggle to make simple images, aperture masking can convert a large ground-based telescope into VLA-style telescope array allowing imaging of complex dust shells around Wolf-Rayet Stars, Evolved Stars, and even Young Stars. Currently, we are using the Keck-1 telescope for this work, and new projects to combine aperture masking with adaptive optics and also with mid-infrared imaging are beginning.
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