Antoine Émile Henry Labeyrie

Who is Antoine Émile Henry Labeyrie?

Antoine Émile Henry Labeyrie is a French astronomer and since 1991 has held the "Observational astrophysics" chair at the Collège de France.

Antoine Émile Henry Labeyrie graduated from the "grande école" SupOptique. He invented speckle interferometry, and works with astronomical interferometers. Labeyrie concentrated particularly on the use of "diluted optics" beam combination or "densified pupils" of a similar type but larger scale than those Michelson used for measuring the diameters of stars in the 1920s, in contrast to other astronomical interferometer researchers who generally switched to pupil-plane beam combination in the 1980s and 1990s.

He is currently working on what he calls a "Hypertelescope", an extremely large astronomical interferometer with spherical geometry that might theoretically show features on Earth-like worlds around other suns. This "Hypertelescope" project would be much more complex than the Darwin Mission and Terrestrial Planet Finder interferometer missions, and would involve many large free-flying spacecraft seen as parts of a fractionated spacecraft or a satellite constellation, utilizing a densified pupil beam combiner.