Milli-arcsecond imaging of SS Lep

SS Leporis, a symbiotic star showing the Algol paradox and presenting clear evidence of ongoing mass transfer, in which the donor has been thought to fill its Roche lobe, is a target particularly suited to this kind of study. Since previous spectroscopic and interferometric observations have not been able to fully constrain the system morphology and characteristics, we go one step further to determine its orbital parameters, for which we need new interferometric observations directly probing the inner parts of the system with a much higher number of spatial frequencies.

We use data obtained at eight different epochs with the VLTI instruments AMBER and PIONIER in the H and K bands. We performed aperture synthesis imaging to obtain the first model-independent view of this system. We then modelled it as a binary (whose giant is spatially resolved) that is surrounded by a circumbinary disc.