Milliarcsecond angular resolution of reddened stellar sources in the vicinity of the Galactic Center

TL;DR

This study demonstrates the use of lunar occultation with a large telescope in the near-infrared to achieve milliarcsecond resolution of stellar sources near the Galactic Center, revealing binaries and stellar diameters.

Contribution

First application of lunar occultation technique on a large telescope in the near-IR, with a developed data pipeline and successful detection of binaries and stellar diameters.

Findings

Detected two binaries with subarcsecond separation

Resolved three stars with ~2 mas diameter

Characterized the method's performance with unresolved stars

Abstract

For the first time, the lunar occultation technique has been employed on a very large telescope in the near-IR with the aim of achieving systematically milliarcsecond resolution on stellar sources. We have demonstrated the burst mode of the ISAAC instrument, using a fast read-out on a small area of the detector to record many tens of seconds of data at a time on fields of few squared arcsec. We have used the opportunity to record a large number of LO events during a passage of the Moon close to the Galactic Center in March 2006. We have developed a data pipeline for the treatment of LO data, including the automated estimation of the main data analysis parameters using a wavelet-based method, and the preliminary fitting and plotting of all light curves. We recorded 51 LO events over about four hours. Of these, 30 resulted of sufficient quality to enable a detailed fitting. We detected two binaries with subarcsec projected separation and three stars with a marginally resolved angular diameter of about 2 mas. Two more SiO masers, were found to be resolved and in one case we could recover the brightness profile of the extended emission, which is well consistent with an optically thin shell. The remaining unresolved stars were used to characterize the performance of the method. The LO technique at a very large telescope is a powerful and efficient method to achieve angular resolution, sensitivity, and dynamic range that are among the best possible today with any technique. The selection of targets is naturally limited and LOs are fixed-time events, however each observation requires only a few minutes including overheads. As such, LOs are ideally suited to fill small gaps of idle time between standard observations.