Speckle interferometry of Hipparcos link stars

Speckle interferometry has been carried out on 39 stars that had been selected as provisionally suitable for linking Hipparcos positional measurements to an extragalactic reference frame by Space Telescope. We used the Imperial College, London, speckle interferometer and autocorrelator on the Anglo-Australian 3.9-m telescope. The result is that about 30 per cent of the stars selected turned out to be confirmed or suspected multiple stars in the range 0.03–0.7 arcsec.