AMBER and the VLT Interferometer (Fabien Malbet, Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de l'Observatoire de Grenoble)

The AMBER instrument installed at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) combines three beams from as many telescopes to produce spectrally dispersed fringes from milli-arcsecond angular scale in the near infrared. Two years after installation, first scientific observations have been carried out during the Science Demonstration Time and the Guaranteed Time mostly on bright sources due to some VLTI limitations. I will review the first astrophysical results and show which types of completely new information is brought by AMBER. The first astrophysical results have been mainly focusing on stellar wind structure, kinematics, and its interaction with dust usually concentrated in a disk. Because AMBER has dramatically increased the number of measures per baseline, this instrument brings strong constraints on morphologies and models despite a relatively poor (u,v) coverage for each object. The first science has mainly focused on the environment of various types of stars. Observations described are: the discs and wind in the young star MWC297; the rotating gas envelope around the hot active star alpha Arae; the spin-orbit alignment of the Fomalhaut planetary system; the mass loss from the massive star Eta Carinae; the colliding wind WR and O star binary gamma2 Velorum; the outburst of the recurrent nova RS Oph.