Astronomy & Celestial Mechanics
the sky, computed
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Angular diameter — the series

2 essays on one idea, from the one that introduces it to the one that assumes the rest.
  1. Fringe visibility for a 47 mas disc at 575 nm. Fringe visibility against the separation of the two apertures, for a disc 47 milliarcseconds across seen at 575 nm. The solid curve is a uniform disc, |2J₁(x)/x| with x = πθB/λ; it is exactly one at zero baseline, where both apertures see the same wavefront, and falls to zero at 3.08 m — read off the drawn samples, and equal to 1.21967 λ/θ to better than one part in a million. That is the measurement: not a brightness, a baseline. The dashed curve is the same disc with linear limb darkening u = 0.4, whose null is 4.9% further out at 3.23 m — so the same observed null implies 47 mas as a uniform disc and 49.3 mas limb-darkened, and a diameter quoted without its model is a number without a unit. At the 2.54 m aperture of the telescope this was done on, the visibility is still 0.17: one mirror cannot reach the null, which is the same statement as saying it cannot resolve the star.

    An angle of five hundredths of an arcsecond

    No telescope has ever resolved a star other than the Sun, and stellar diameters are measured anyway — by finding the separation of two apertures at which the star's interference fringes vanish. What that returns is an angle; the radius arrives only when a distance is brought in, and the distance is the worse-known half.

    part 1 · starlight
  2. A few per cent of diameter, hidden in the second lobe. Visibility against baseline in the natural variable πθB/λ, for stars with linear limb-darkening coefficients of 0, 0.3, 0.6, 0.9, each rescaled to the uniform disc that best fits its own first lobe. In the first lobe the four curves are within 0.72 per cent of one another; past the first null they differ by up to 4.2 per cent. That is the whole difficulty of measuring a stellar diameter. A limb-darkened star has a faint edge, so a uniform-disc fit returns a diameter 9.7 per cent too small at u = 0.9 and 2.5 per cent too small at u = 0.3 — and the information needed to tell which is in a region where the visibility is under five per cent and the calibration errors of a real interferometer are comparable to the signal. The correction from what is measured to what is wanted is taken from a model atmosphere, because the observation that would supply it is the hardest one there is. The fit here is done by least squares on the drawn curves rather than read from a conversion table, and the zero-coefficient case returns the uniform disc to 0.00 per cent, which is the fit checking itself.

    A diameter that depends on a model atmosphere

    An interferometer measures fringe visibilities and somebody fits a disc. A uniform disc and a limb-darkened one agree to within a per cent across the whole of the first lobe and differ by five in the second — where the visibility is under five per cent and the calibration errors are the same size.

    part 2 · starlight

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