This week on HST

HST Programs: March 28, 2011 - April 3, 2011

Selected highlights

GO 11644: A dynamical-compositional survey of the Kuiper belt: a new window into the formation of the outer solar system

The view from Sedna: an artist's impression

The Kuiper Belt lies beyond the orbit of Neptune, extending from ~30 AU to ~50 AU from the Sun, and includes at least 70,000 objects with diameters exceeding 100 km. Setting aside Pluto, the first trans-Neptunian objects were discovered in the early 1990s. Most are relatively modest in size, with diameters of a few hundred km and photometric properties that suggested an icy composition, similar to Pluto and its main satellite, Charon. Over the last three years, a handful of substantially larger bodies have been discovered, with diameters of more than 1000 km; one of the objects, 2003 UB313, is comparable in size to Pluto (2320 km.). At the same time, ground-based surveys, such as the Deep Ecliptic Survey, the Canada-France Ecliptic plane Survey and the Palomar Quest Survey, scanned the ecliptic for fainter, lower-mass objects, with the aim of using their properties to assess the likely chemical composition and dynamical history of the early Solar System. The present program will use Wide Field Camera 3 to push up to 2 magnitudes fainter than these ground-based studies, providing reliable estimates of compositions for a representative sample of KBOs.

Part of the GOODS/Chandra Deep Field South field, as imaged by HST

CANDELS is one of three Multi-Cycle Treasury Program, whose observations will be executed over the next three HST Cycles. It builds on past investment of both space- and ground-based observational resources. In particular, it 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, the 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. The CANDELS program 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 prime aims of the program are twofold: reconstructing the history of galaxy formation, star formation and nuclear galactic activity at redshifts between z=8 and z=1.5; and searching for high-redshift supernovae to measure their properties at redshifts between z~1 and z~2. The program incorporates a tiered set of observations that complement, in areal coverage and depth, the deep UDF observations, while the timing of individual observations will be set to permit detection of high redshift SNe candidates for subsequent follow-up.

GO 12176: Long term observations of Saturn's northern aurora

Saturnian aurorae

Planetary aurorae are stimulated by the influx of charged particles from the Sun, which travel along magnetic field lines and funnel into the atmosphere near the magnetic poles. Aurorae therefore require that a planet has both a substantial atmosphere and a magnetic field. They are a common phenomenon on Earth, sometimes visible at magnetic latitudes more than 40 degrees from the pole, and have also been seen on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. In August 2009, Saturn passed through its equinox, with the Sun moving into the northern Saturnian hemisphere, and Earth crossing the ring plane in mid-September. As a result, Saturn's northern pole has now become accessible to direct observations. This proposal aims to use the ACS/SBC to study aurorae in the northern hemisphere, coordinating with observations by the Cassini mission, and allowing comparison of their characteristics against observations of southern aurorae from previous years. In particular, the southern aurorae tend to occur in an oval whose centre is displaced from the south (rotational) pole. Does the northern hemisphere exhibit a similar phenomenon?

GO 12292: SWELLS: doubling the number of disk-dominated edge-on spiral lens galaxies

ACS images of galaxy-galaxy Einstein ring lenses from the Sloan survey

Gravitational lensing is a consequence the theory of general relativity. Its importance as an astrophysical tool first became apparent with the realisation (in 1979) that the quasar pair Q0957+561 actually comprised two lensed images of the same background quasar. In the succeeding years, lensing has been used primarily to probe the mass distribution of galaxy clusters, using theoretical models to analyse the arcs and arclets that are produced by strong lensing of background galaxies, and the large-scale mass distribution, through analysis of weak lensing effects on galaxy morphologies. Gravitational lensing can also be used to investigate the mass distribution of individual galaxies; in particular, important questions remain regarding the dark matter profiles of spiral galaxies, and how dark matter responds to and/or reacts to the formation of disk systems. The present program aims to identify edge-on spiral galaxies that are lensing background sources. As edge-on systems, the observed rotation curves give the rotational velocities directly which, combined with the lensing measurements, allows deconvolution of the relative contributions of dark and visible material. present program is using ACS to survey 16 candidate systems, with the expectation that around half will be confirmed as lensing systems.