First astrophysical results from AMBER/VLTI

Fabien Malbet (1) , Romain G. Petrov (2) , Gerd Weigelt (3) , Philippe Stee (4) , Eric Tatulli (5) , Armando Domiciano de Souza (2) , Florentin Millour (1, 2)

1 LAOG - Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Grenoble
2 LUAN - Laboratoire Universitaire d'Astrophysique de Nice
3 MPIFR - Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie
4 OCA - Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur
5 OAA - INAF - Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri

The AMBER instrument installed at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) combines three beams from as many telescopes to produce spectrally dispersed fringes from milli-arcsecond angular scale in the near infrared. Two years after installation, first scientific observations have been carried out during the Science Demonstration Time and the Guaranteed Time mostly on bright sources due to some VLTI limitations. In this paper, we review these first astrophysical results and we show which types of completely new information is brought by AMBER. The first astrophysical results have been mainly focusing on stellar wind structure, kinematics, and its interaction with dust usually concentrated in a disk. Because AMBER has dramatically increased the number of measures per baseline, this instrument brings strong constraints on morphology and models despite a relatively poor (u, v) coverage for each object.

Mots clés: Optical interferometry; infrared; young stellar objects; stars; evolved stars; massive stars; hot stars

Domaines: Astrophysique [astro-ph]; Cosmologie et astrophysique extra-galactique [astro-ph.CO]

Fabien Malbet, Romain G. Petrov, Gerd Weigelt, Philippe Stee, Eric Tatulli, et al.. First astrophysical results from AMBER/VLTI. Advances in Stellar Interferometry, 2006, Orlando, United States. ⟨hal-00080756⟩