| Program Number | Principal Investigator | Program Title |
|---|---|---|
| 11622 | Heather A. Knutson, California Institute of Technology | A Search for Water and Methane on a Neptune-Mass Transiting Planet |
| 12446 | Michael Shara, American Museum of Natural History | Ionization and Light Echoes in the T Pyxidis Nebula |
| 12450 | C. S. Kochanek, The Ohio State University | Understanding A New Class of Mid?IR Transients |
| 12455 | Marc Postman, Space Telescope Science Institute | Through a Lens, Darkly - New Constraints on the Fundamental Components of the Cosmos |
| 12456 | Marc Postman, Space Telescope Science Institute | Through a Lens, Darkly - New Constraints on the Fundamental Components of the Cosmos |
| 12457 | Marc Postman, Space Telescope Science Institute | Through a Lens, Darkly - New Constraints on the Fundamental Components of the Cosmos |
| 12468 | Keith S. Noll, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center | How Fast Did Neptune Migrate? A Search for Cold Red Resonant Binaries |
| 12472 | Claus Leitherer, Space Telescope Science Institute | CCC - The Cosmic Carbon Conundrum |
| 12473 | David Kent Sing, University of Exeter | An Optical Transmission Spectral Survey of hot-Jupiter Exoplanetary Atmospheres |
| 12481 | Carrie Bridge, California Institute of Technology | WISE-Selected Lyman-alpha Blobs: An Extreme Dusty Population at High-z |
| 12525 | William C. Keel, University of Alabama | Giant Ionized Clouds Around Local AGN - Obscuration and History |
| 12540 | Robert P. Kirshner, Harvard University | UV Studies of a Core Collapse Supernova |
| 12549 | Thomas M. Brown, Space Telescope Science Institute | The Formation History of the Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxies |
| 12557 | Kayhan Gultekin, University of Michigan | Low-Mass Black Holes and CIV in Low-Luminosity AGN |
| 12568 | Matthew A. Malkan, University of California - Los Angeles | WFC3 Infrared Spectroscopic Parallel Survey WISP: A Survey of Star Formation Across Cosmic Time |
| 12572 | Michele Trenti, University of Cambridge | The Brightest of Reionizing Galaxies Pure Parallel Survey |
| 12575 | Anthony H. Gonzalez, University of Florida | New Constraints on Intragroup Light and the Baryon Budget in Galaxy Groups |
| 12578 | N. M. Forster Schreiber, Max-Planck-Institut fur extraterrestrische Physik | Constraints on the Mass Assembly and Early Evolution of z~2 Galaxies: Witnessing the Growth of Bulges and Disks |
| 12586 | Kailash C. Sahu, Space Telescope Science Institute | Detecting and Measuring the Masses of Isolated Black Holes and Neutron Stars through Astrometric Microlensing |
| 12600 | Reginald J. Dufour, Rice University | Carbon and Nitrogen Enrichment Patterns in Planetary Nebulae |
| 12603 | Timothy M. Heckman, The Johns Hopkins University | Understanding the Gas Cycle in Galaxies: Probing the Circumgalactic Medium |
| 12613 | Knud Jahnke, Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie, Heidelberg | Are major galaxy mergers a significant mechanism to trigger massive black hole growth at z=2? |
| 12616 | Linhua Jiang, Arizona State University | Near-IR Imaging of the Most Distant Spectroscopically-Confirmed Galaxies in the Subaru Deep Field |
| 12668 | Slawomir Stanislaw Piatek, New Jersey Institute of Technology | Proper Motion Survey of Classical and SDSS Local Group Dwarf Galaxies |
GO 12456: Through a Lens, Darkly - New Constraints on the Fundamental Components of the Cosmos
The cluster MACS J1206.2-0.47, imaged by HST as part of the CLASH program |
The overwhelming majority of galaxies in the universe are found in clusters. As such, these systems offer an important means of tracing the development of large-scale structure through the history of the universe. Moreover, as intense concentrations of mass, galaxy clusters provide highly efficient gravitational lenses, capable of concentrating and magnifying light from background high redshift galaxies to allow detailed spectropic investigations of star formation in the early universe. Hubble imaging has already revealed lensed arcs and detailed sub-structure within a handful of rich clusters. At the same time, the lensing characteristics provide information on the mass distribution within the lensing cluster. The present program aims to capitalise fully on HST's imaging capabilities, utilising the refurbished Advanced Camera for Surveys and the newly-installed Wide-Field Camera 3 to obtain 17-colour imaging of 25 rich clusters. The data will be use to map the mass profiles of the clusters and probe the characteristics of the high-redshift lensed galaxies. Since ACS and WFC3 can be operated in parallel, the program will also use parallel imaging in offset fields to search for high-redshift supernovae. The present observations target the cluster MACS1931-263 at z=0.35. |
GO 12549: The Formation History of the Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxies
The Bootes I dwarf galaxy (SDSS data) |
The Milky Way possesses at least 15 satellite galaxies. The most prominent are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, irregular galaxies which have been known since at least the tenth century. The remaining systems are gas-poor dwarf spheroidal systems, with luminosities less than 108 LSun and masses less than 108 MSun. All of these dwarfs were discovered from wide field imaging surveys. The two brightest systems, Scuptor and Fornax, were found on plates taken in the 1930s by Harvard's Boyden Observatory, in Bloemfontein, South Africa. The brighter systems in the northern hemisphere, including Ursa Minor and Draco, were identified from photographic plates taken as part of the first Palomar Sky Survey in the 1950s, and the brighter southern systems, including Carina and Sextans (L ~ 105 LSun, were uncovered in 80s and 90s on plates taken with UK Schmidt telescope, Siding Spring, Australia. These systems have such low densities that they are barely discernible to the eye; in fact, Sextans was discovered based from analysis of automated plate scans. The advent of CCD surveys and improved analysis techniques have allowed astronomers to push to even fainter, more diffuse systems. In the past fwe years, SDSS has yielded a new class of systems, dubbed ultra-faint dwarfs, with lminosities less than 104 LSun and mass-to-light ratios exceeding 100. The faintest of these systems, Bootes I, has a total luminosity of only ~300 LSun, or only ten times more luminous than Vega. The theoretical expectatio is that these systems represent dark-matter dominated satellites predicted by Lambda-CDM models. The present program will use the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to obtain deep F606W (V/R) and F814W (I) images of six systems, Bootes I, Canes Venatici, Hercules, Leo IV, Ursa Major I and Coma Berenices. The aim is to use detailed data on the colour-magnitude diagram to probe the chemical composition, age and star formation histories of these systems. |
GO 12603: Understanding the Gas Cycle in Galaxies: Probing the Circumgalactic Medium
A computer simulation of galactic gas accretion and outflow |
Galaxy formation, and the overall history of star formation within a galaxy, clearly demands the presence of gas. The detailed evolution therefore is tied very closely to how gas is accreted, recycled, circulated through the halo and disk, and, perhaps, ejected back into the intergalactic medium. Tracing that evolutionary history is difficult, since gas passes through many different phases, some of which are easier to detect than others. During accretion and, probably, subsequent recycling, the gas is expected to be reside predominantly at high temperatures. The most effective means of detecting such gas is through ultraviolet spectroscopy, where gas within nearby systems can be detected as absorption lines superimposed on the spectra of more distant objects, usually quasars. The present program is using the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to probe gas in the circumgalactic medium for a large sample of relatively local disk galaxies. The targets are drawn from the GALEX Arecibo SDSS Survey (GASS), with the aim of combining the various observations to map atomic, molecular and ionised gas in these systems. The galaxies lie at redshifts between 0.02 and 0.05, and COS will be used to observe QSOs whose sightlines pass within 250 kpc of the galaxy core. Those sightlines run through the halos of the galaxies, and the QSOs therefore provide a pencilbeam backlight that probes hot circumgalactic gas. |
GO 12668: Proper Motion Survey of Classical and SDSS Local Group Dwarf Galaxies
The low-mass dwarf galaxy, Leo II
|
The Milky Way, m31 and M33 are the three largest galaxies in the Local Group. The system, however, includes more than 25 other members, the majority being dwarf spheroidal galaxies that are satellites of either M31 or the Milky Way. Those galaxies have old, evolved stellar populations, and even the most prominent have masses that are less than a few x 107 MSun, or 10-4 that of the Milky Way. All of these galaxies are moving in the potential set by the overall Local Group system, but dominated by M31 and the Milky Way. Determining full space motions for the dwarfs therefore provide a means of constraining that potential. Even thought the galaxies, and their brightest stellar constituents, are faint, measuring radial velocity is a relatively straightforward procedure. Deriving tangential motions is not, since the typical proper motions of these systems are a few mas/year at best. The present proposal aims to capitalise on the exceptional resolution and high stability of HST to address this issue. WFC3 will target 7 dwarf galaxies, imaging fields that are centred on a background QSO. That QSO serves as a reference point for measurement of the transverse motion of stars in the foreground dwarf galaxy. |