Something like the Sun
Aaron Baca
It's the star whose image was seen around the world when a groundbreaking photograph taken by the university's Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) was published recently, proving that CHARA's telescopes are among the most powerful astronomical tools on the planet.
"The old saying really holds true in astronomy: one picture is worth a thousand words," said CHARA Director and Regents' Professor Hal McAlister.
Scientists snapped the Altair picture in 2006 to create the first detailed image of a hydrogen-burning star other than our sun.
A paper about the achievement was published in a spring issue of the journal Science.
The Altair image is the first of its kind because stars are so far from Earth that even the biggest ones appear to be tiny points of light through even the largest telescopes. The Altair image shows an oblong sun spinning so fast that its equator bulges outward. The rapid rotation makes the star's poles burn hotter while the equator stays cooler.
Working under a National Science Foundation grant, the CHARA team used a University of Michigan-designed instrument to collect beams from four CHARA telescopes to capture the Altair image.
"This really signals a new way of doing astronomy," McAlister said.
CHARA has six 1-meter telescopes spread across Mount Wilson outside Los Angeles that mimic a giant telescope with a diameter of 1,000 feet. The facility has more imaging power than any other optical or interferometer telescope and can zoom in on distant objects better than the Hubble space telescope.
McAlister founded CHARA in 1984. For his efforts to build the center, he was honored last spring with the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's 2007 Maria and Eric Muhlmann Award, which is given annually to spotlight significant advances and innovations in astronomy.