Astronomers have captured an image of Altair, the first time anyone has detailed the surface of a star like our own sun.

While astronomers have recently imaged a few of the enormous, dying, red-giant stars, this is the first time anyone has seen the surface of a relatively tiny hydrogen-burning star.

An international team of astronomers captured the portrait of Altair using four of the six telescopes at a facility on Mt. Wilson, CA, operated by the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA).

The CHARA telescopes made the breakthrough observation owing to a novel system that cleaned up some of the distortions from Earth's atmosphere, the Michigan Infrared Combiner. Recent advances in fiber optic telecommunication technology made this new combiner possible.

Using the telescopes as an interferometer, a multi-telescope system, the researchers captured infrared lightwaves like a giant telescope 265 meters by 195 meters (100 times the size of the mirror on NASA's Hubble telescope and roughly 25 times the resolution).

The combiner had only been successfully used with radio telescopes such as the Very Large Array near Socorro, NM, said researchers.

Altair is a spinning "rapid rotator," just like Vega, one of Altair's partners (with the slow-spinning supergiant Deneb) in the night sky's Summer Triangle. Altair spins about 300 kilometers per second at its equator, distorting its shape. The star is 22 percent wider than tall. The new telescope measurements confirmed the oblong shape, yet showed slightly different surface temperature patterns than what models predicted. Altair is one of the closest stars in our neighborhood, only about 15 light years away.

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• Big Possibilities for Small Stars
• CHARA Observatory Comes into Focus

--The National Science Foundation and SPACE.com Staff

Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation