On-sky Demonstration of Subdiffraction-limited Astronomical Measurement Using a Photonic Lantern

Abstract

Resolving fine details of astronomical objects provides critical insights into their underlying physical processes. This drives in part the desire to construct ever-larger telescopes and interferometer arrays and to observe at shorter wavelength to lower the diffraction limit of angular resolution. Alternatively, one can aim to overcome the diffraction limit by extracting more information from a single telescope's aperture. A promising way to do this is spatial mode-based imaging, which projects focal-plane field onto a set of spatial modes before detection, retaining focal-plane phase information crucial at small angular scales but typically lost in intensity imaging. However, the practical implementation of mode-based imaging in astronomy from the ground has been challenged by atmospheric turbulence. Here, we present the first on-sky demonstration of a subdiffraction-limited, mode-based measurement using a photonic lantern (PL)-fed spectrometer installed on the SCExAO instrument at the Subaru Telescope. We introduce a novel calibration strategy that mitigates time-varying wavefront error and misalignment effects, leveraging simultaneously recorded focal-plane images and using a spectral-differential technique that self-calibrates the data. Observing the classical Be star $\beta$ CMi, we detected spectral-differential spatial signals and reconstructed images of its H$\alpha$-emitting disk. We achieved an unprecedented H$\alpha$ photocenter precision of 50$\mu$as in about 10-minute observation with a single telescope, measuring the disk's near-far side asymmetry for the first time. This work demonstrates the high precision, efficiency, and practicality of photonic mode-based imaging techniques to recover subdiffraction-limited information, opening new avenues for high angular resolution spectroscopic studies in astronomy.