This week on HST

HST Programs: July 22 - July 28, 2013

Program Number Principal Investigator Program Title
12114 Julianne Dalcanton, University of Washington A Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury - I
12115 Julianne Dalcanton, University of Washington A Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury - I
12488 Mattia Negrello, Open University SNAPshot observations of gravitational lens systems discovered via wide-field Herschel imaging
12519 Raghvendra Sahai, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Newly Discovered LMC Preplanetary Nebulae as Probes of Stellar Evolution
12866 Mark Swinbank, University of Durham A Morphological Study of ALMA Identified Sub-mm Galaxies with HST/WFC3
12870 Boris T. Gaensicke, The University of Warwick The mass and temperature distribution of accreting white dwarfs
12873 Beth Biller, Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie, Heidelberg Search for Planetary Mass Companions around the Coolest Brown Dwarfs
12874 David Floyd, Monash University Quasar accretion disks: is the standard model valid?
12880 Adam Riess, The Johns Hopkins University The Hubble Constant: Completing HST's Legacy with WFC3
12884 Harald Ebeling, University of Hawaii A Snapshot Survey of The Most Massive Clusters of Galaxies
12890 Edward M. Sion, Villanova University The Unique Recurrent Nova T Pyxidis: The Decline and Transition to Quiescence
12893 Ronald L Gilliland, The Pennsylvania State University Study of Small and Cool Kepler Planet Candidates with High Resolution Imaging
12897 Marc W. Buie, Southwest Research Institute Pluto System Orbits in Support of New Horizons
12902 Matthew A. Malkan, University of California - Los Angeles WFC3 Infrared Spectroscopic Parallel Survey WISP: A Survey of Star Formation Across Cosmic Time
12904 Joel N. Bregman, University of Michigan The Galactic Fountain Meets The Accreting Halo
12922 Jong-Hak Woo, Seoul National University Calibrating black hole mass estimators using the enlarged sample of reverberation-mapped AGNs
12934 Clive N. Tadhunter, University of Sheffield The importance warm outflows in the most rapidly evolving galaxies in the local Universe
12967 Abhijit Saha, National Optical Astronomy Observatory, AURA Establishing a Network of DA White Dwarf SED Standards
12978 Daniel E. Welty, University of Chicago Properties of Diffuse Molecular Gas in the Magellanic Clouds
12982 Nicolas Lehner, University of Notre Dame Are the Milky Way's High Velocity Clouds Fuel for Star Formation or for the Galactic Corona?
13004 Margaret Meixner, The Johns Hopkins University The Life Cycle of Dust in the Magellanic Clouds: Crucial Constraints from Zn and Cr depletions
13017 Timothy M. Heckman, The Johns Hopkins University UV Spectroscopy of Lyman Break Galaxy Analogs: A Local Window on the Early Universe
13045 Asantha Cooray, University of California - Irvine The Nature and Environment of a Luminous Starburst Galaxy During the Era of Reionization
13046 Robert P. Kirshner, Harvard University RAISIN: Tracers of cosmic expansion with SN IA in the IR
13050 Remco van den Bosch, Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie, Heidelberg The Most Massive Black Holes in Small Galaxies
13063 Adam Riess, The Johns Hopkins University Supernova Follow-up for MCT
13113 C. S. Kochanek, The Ohio State University ENERGY DEPENDENT X-RAY MICROLENSING AND THE STRUCTURE OF QUASARS
13176 Daniel Apai, University of Arizona Extrasolar Storms: The Physics and Chemistry of Evolving Cloud Structures in Brown Dwarf Atmospheres
13184 Jelle Kaastra, Space Research Organization Netherlands Deciphering AGN outflows: multiwavelength monitoring of NGC 5548
13286 Ryan Foley, University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign Understanding the Progenitor Systems, Explosion Mechanisms, and Cosmological Utility of Type Ia Supernovae
13502 Steven Chesley, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Search for the Binary Companion of Deep Impact Target 2002 GT
Selected highlights

GO 12866: A Morphological Study of ALMA Identified Sub-mm Galaxies with HST/WFC3


The Chandra Deep Field South
Over the past ten years or so, deep sub-millimetre imaging observations have proven an effective means of identifying luminous star-forming galaxies at moderate to high redshifts (z>1.5). The sub-millimetre observations are particularly sensitive to dusty environments, and therefore select the most massive active star-formign systems.However, moving from detection to characterisation has been difficult since previous sub-millimetre facilities had low angular resolution, typically 20 arcseconds or more, severely complicating any attempt to cross-match against data at other wavelengths. With the commissioning of ALMA, and the availability of sub-arcsecond astrometry, circumstances have changed drastically. The present proposal builds on ALMA observations of ~100 sub-mm galaxies located within the Chandra Deep Field South, and aims to use the WFC3-IR camera to obtain high-resolution H-band imaging of thsoe systems. Combining the HST and ALMA data will enable a clear charcterisation of the ovearll morphology, and hence insight into how star formation is progressing within those systems.
GO 12897: Pluto system orbits in support of New Horizons


Hubble Space Telescope images of the Pluto system, including the recently discovered moons, P4 and P5
Pluto, one of the largest members of the Kuiper Belt and, until recently, the outermost planet in the solar system, has been in the news over the last year or two. Besides the extended "planet"/"dwarf planet" debate, Pluto is the primary target of the New Horizons Mission. In 1978, James Christy discovered from analyses of photographic plates that Pluto has a relatively large companion moon, Charon, with a diameter of ~1200 km, or almost half that of Pluto itself. In 2005, Hubble observations led to the discovery of two small moons, christened Nix and Hydra. These two new moons are 5,000 fainter than Pluto itself, implying diameters as small as ~30-50 km if the surface composition is similar to Pluto itself. Over the past two years, a series of observations were taken in support of the New Horizons mission, using WFC3 to search for faint rings due to dust particles that might jeopardise the space craft and require a course correction. While no rings were detected unequivocally, two small satellite, christened "P4" and "P5", have been discovered. Both are significantly fainter than Nix and Hydra, and may well be as small as 10-13 km in size. There is also some evidence that might point to the presence of a debris ring within Charon's orbit. The present observations, again in support of New Horizons, will use WFC3 to push to even fainter magnitudes to both better characterise the P4 and P5 orbits and search for even fainter moons.
GO 13063: Supernova follow-up for MCT Programs


High redshift supernovae from HST observations in previous cycles
CANDELS and CLASH are two of three Multi-Cycle Treasury Programs whose observations will be executed over HST Cycles 18, 19 and 20. Both programs have components that focus on the identification and subsequent follow-up of candidate high redshift supernovae. CLASH focuses on galaxy clusters (eg GO 12065 ), with 17-colour observations using ACS and WFC3. But while the cluster is centred on one camera, the second camera is being used to take deep images in fields offset by several arcminutes, and the multiple exposures obtained in those regions can be used to search for high redshift supernovae. CANDELS is a tiered wide-field imaging program that includes coverage of the two fields of the Great Observatory Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), centred on the northern Hubble Deep Field (HDF) in Ursa Major and the Chandra Deep Field-South in Fornax. In addition to deep HST data at optical and near-infrared wavelengths, those fields have been covered at X-ray wavelengths by Chandra (obviously) and XMM-Newton; at mid-infrared wavelengths with Spitzer; and ground-based imaging and spectroscopy using numerous telescopes, including the Kecks, Surbaru and the ESO VLT. This represents an accumulation of almost 1,000 orbits of HST time, and comparable scale allocations on Chandra, Spitzer and ground-based facilities. CANDELS is capitalising on this large investment, with new observations with WFC3 and ACS on both GOODS fields, and on three other fields within the COSMOS, EGS and UDS survey areas (see this link for more details). The existence of previous datasets permits searching for high-redshift supernovae, with the prime aim of measuring their properties at redshifts between z~1 and z~2. The present program is focused on a high-redshift candidate identified within the EGS field.
GO 13176: Extrasolar Storms: The Physics and Chemistry of Evolving Cloud Structures in Brown Dwarf Atmospheres


Brown dwarfs are likely to have complex atmospheric structures that resemble Jupiter
Brown dwarfs are failed stars - objects that form like stars, by gravitational collapse within giant molecular clouds, but which have insufficient mass to raise the central temperature above 107 K, and which therefore are unable to ignite hydrogran fusion and maintain a long-lived central energy source. As such, these objects reach a maximum surface temperature of perhaps 3,000K some tens of millions of years after their formation, and subsequently cool and fade into oblivion. As they cool, they move through spectral types M, L and T, with the oldest brown dwarfs now likely to have temperatures close to 300K and emergent spectra characterised by water and ammonia bands, the putative signatures of the spectral class Y. As these dwarfs cool from L to T (~1500 to ~1200K), the atmospheres undergo significant changes, with heavier elements condensing to form dust. That dust can form clouds, perhaps giving the dwarf's surface a banded appearance, similar to Jupiter. The clouds themselves may appear and disappear over relatively short timescales, leading to photometric variations at particular wavelengths. Past programs have used both Spitzer and HST to monitor spectral variability in a number of systems. The present program aimes to broaden the sample by targeting six known variable for time-resolved WFC3 grism spectroscopy. All of the targets will also be obsreved with Spitzer.
Past weeks:
Cycle 14 observations (from March 13 2006 to June 30 2006)
Cycle 15 observations (from July 1 2006)
Cycle 16 observations (from July 1 2007)
Cycle 17 observations (from July 13 2009)
Cycle 18 observations (from August 30 2010)
Cycle 19 observations (from October 3 2011)
Cycle 20 observations (from October 1 2012)