| Imaging Circumstellar Environments with a Nulling Interferometer (2007) | |||||||||||||||
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| cancellation, allowing direct detection of warm, Jupiter-size planets and faint zodiacal dust around other nearby stars 5 . With a conventional telescope, the very high contrast ratio needed to resolve a planet from a star requires diffraction-limited resolution several times sharper than the angular separation. At the longer thermal wavelengths, of most interest for imaging warm planets, telescope apertures of tens of meters would be needed. In Bracewell's interferometric method two small apertures suffice, provided the stellar wavefronts are exactly superposed out of phase with no relative tilt, so the cancellation is in detail across the whole pupil. Then the transmission pattern on the sky, for monochromatic light, is one of finely spaced fringes given by T (`) = sin 2 ( ß`d ); (1) where d is the element spacing, is the wavelength of observation, and< | |||||||||||||||
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