When you look at stars with the naked eye or through a telescope, they appear as diffraction discs. In colloquial terms, they "sparkle". This makes it impossible for us to find out anything about their actual size. In 1891, Michelson therefore proposed using an interferometer to determine the angular diameter of stars. The interferometer consisted of a telescope and a double slit placed in front of the telescope aperture and was later named the Michelson Stellar Interferometer. This principle is still used today in large telescopes.

In this experiment you will use this method to determine the diameter of a dummy star. You can find background information on the information sheet and instructions on the worksheet.

This experiment has been developed and first performed by Illarramendi et al. in 2014 (https://doi.org/10.1119/1.4869280).

Author: Hendrik Maas, Physics Didactics group, 2023

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