An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics
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A technique for blocking the light of a bright source in order to reveal a faint source near it. This technique uses destructive → interference between two or more → coherent beams from a number of telescopes to make the bright center dark. Nulling interferometry can be used to search the region immediately around a star for → extrasolar planets and → circumstellar dust clouds by suppressing the star's glare.

Nulling, from → null; → interferometry.

A whole number which characterizes a particular position of an interference fringe according to whether there is interference arising from one, two, three, etc. wavelength difference of path. Same as → interference order

→ order; → interference.

An → interferometer designed for radio frequencies.

→ radio; → interferometer.

A technique for generating a clear composite image of a celestial object blurred by → atmospheric turbulence in which a large number of short-exposure photographs are mathematically correlated by a computer. By comparing the behavior of the → speckles in a series of images it is possible to approach the theoretical resolution of the telescope.

→ speckle; → interferometry.

A technique in radio interferometry in which the individual telescopes are not directly connected together, but instead make their observations separately with very accurate timings. The data are later sent to a central correlator to be combined. With this technique the individual telescopes can be arbitrarily far apart, and so the technique provides the highest resolution images in astronomy, typically down to a few milliarcseconds.

→ very; → large; → baseline; → interferometry.

A → Michelson interferometer using → laser beams designed to detect → gravitational waves. It consists of two 3-km-long arms, which house the various machinery required to form a → laser interferometer. The gravitational waves searched for have frequencies between 10 Hz and 10 kHz. Virgo has been designed and built by a collaboration between the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN). It is now operated and improved in Cascina, a small town near Pisa on the site of the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), by an international collaboration of scientists from France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Hungary. The initial Virgo detector observed the sky between 2007 and 2011 together with the two interferometers of the → Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), located in the United States. Virgo underwent a major upgrade after a long shutdown period. The "Advanced Virgo" overhaul lasted 5-year and costed 23 million Euros. The upgraded observatory was inaugurated on 20 February 2017 and, notably, detected the → GW170817 event.

Named after the → Virgo cluster of galaxies whose stellar explosions it aims to detect; → interferometer.

An interferometer using a combination of the four 8.2 m VLT telescopes with the assistance of one or more of the the four 1.8 m Auxiliary Telescopes in order to achieve a very high spatial resolution. The system works in the visible and near- and mid-infrared wavelengths.

→ Very Large Telescope (VLT); → interferometer.