One photon, two photons …
A new observational technique to identify the finest details of celestial sources: after long nights of experiments, stellar intensity interferometry has given its first results.
With a base between the two telescopes on the Asiago plateau of almost 4 kilometers, Luca Zampieri and collaborators target the brightest stars with instruments capable of counting single optical photons and of tagging their arrival time with the precision of the order of a few hundred picoseconds (one ten-billionth of a second).
If applied to ASTRI Mini-Array, this technique could give even more spectacular results.
Asiago upland: the telescopes used in the experiment
Read the details both in the article published by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: “Stellar intensity interferometry of Vega in photon counting mode”, by Luca Zampieri, Giampiero Naletto, Aleksandr Burtovoi, Michele Fiori and Cesare Barbieri and in the in-depth study published by MediaINAF.
This post is also available in: Italian
