[longshadow]

Here's a good overview paper on optical interferometry in space, National Academies of Science

Thanks!

[ThinkPlease]

We also just hired an optical interferometer guy for one of our instrumentation positions. He's done some pretty neat stuff, and we're definitely looking forward to his work when he gets here. The problem with getting such high resolution in the optical is that you need a source with relatively high surface brightness that you can both see and resolve the source at the same time. There's another guy out there who does optical interferometry of Wolf-Rayet stars, really young stars that are sloughing off their outer atmospheres due to radiation pressure. He found, using local optical interferometry (at Keck, I think), that several Wolf-Rayet stars have companions, an effect that couldn't have been discovered without interferometry. Really cool stuff. Both interferometry and high mass stars in the same project.