Development #2: Direct Imaging of the Disk!

We are pleased to announce that images of the disk occulting the F star were obtained interferometrically during ingress (autumn 2009).  Details of this will appear in this week's issue of NATURE journal, April 8th edition.  Watch this space later in the week for more discussion about those pictures and what they tell us.

It's been a long road to get those images that confirm the disk explanation for the epsilon Aurigae eclipses.  Previous blogs and many online sources help explain the method, but its application to epsilon Aurigae has only really become practical this decade with the improvements in "closure phase" imaging made possible with the NSF-sponsored Michigan IR Combiner (MIRC) instrument, at the CHARA array atop Mt. Wilson.

Thanks to Denver University PhD grad, Michelle Creech-Eakman, who is now a professor at New Mexico Tech and project scientist for the new Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer, I was granted permission to propose for use of the old Palomar Testbed Interferometer during summer 2007 to obtain pre-eclipse angular diameters with that 100m baseline set of telescopes during Oct.2007.  These results were reported in both an SAS paper "Adventures in Interferometry" = http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008SASS...27...77M - and later in an Astrophysical Journal Letter (Dec.2008) = http://arxiv.org/pdf/0810.5382v1 .  All the while, the suggestion that interferometric imaging had 'come of age' was implied in my writings, and because of Hal McAlister's gracious invitation to propose for CHARA time, we were able to obtain MIRC+CHARA data in autumn 2008, and again during ingress in 2009.  As previously mentioned,  fires and then mudslides around Mt.Wilson made winter season observing almost impossible, but we reamin optimistic that late summer and autumn 2010 will enable a number of additional sets of imaging to be obtained, and those will greatly enhance our understanding of what's inside the disk and perhaps how it all works.

In the meantime, the eclipse is NOT OVER: mid-eclipse arrives August 2010 - keep observing and reporting!  :-)