This week on HST

HST Programs: July 9 - July 15, 2012

Selected highlights

GO 12289: A COS Snapshot Survey for z < 1.25 Lyman Limit Systems

Detecting hot gas in galactic halos

Galaxy formation, and the overall history of star formation within a galaxy, clearly demands the presence of gas. The detailed evolution therefore depends on how gas is accreted, recycled, circulated through the halo 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. High density gas, such as might occur close to the main bodies of galactic systems, can be identified through the presence of optically thick absorption below the Lyman limit. The present program aims to search for such Lyman limit systems along lines-of-sight towards a sample of quasars at redshifts 0.75 < z < 1.25. The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph will be used to search for these characteristic features, which likely signal the presence of foreground galaxies whose extended gaseous halos absorb light from the QSO. These data will be combined with surveys at other wavelengths covering different redshift ranges to probe the overall number and column density of such systems as a function of redshift.

GO 12474: The frequency and chemical composition of rocky planetary debris around young white dwarfs

Artist's impression of a comet spiralling in to the white dwarf variable, G29-38

During the 1980s, one of the techniques used to search for brown dwarfs was to obtain near-infrared photometry of white dwarf stars. Pioneered by Ron Probst (KPNO), the idea rests on the fact that while white dwarfs are hot (5,000 to 15,000K for the typcail targets0, they are also small (Earth-sized), so they have low luminosities; consequently, a low-mass companion should be detected as excess flux at near- and mid-infrared wavelengths. In 1988, Ben Zuckerman and Eric Becklin detected just this kind of excess around G29-38, a relatively hot DA white dwarf that also happens to lie on the WD instability strip. However, follow-up observations showed that the excess peaked at longer wavelengths than would be expected for a white dwarf; rather, G 29-38 is surrounded by a dusty disk. Given the orbital lifetimes, those dust particles must be regularly replenished, presumably from rocky remnants of a solar system. G 29-38 stood as a lone prototype for almost 2 decades, until a handful of other dusty white dwarfs were identified from Spitzer observations within the last couple of years.In subsequent years, a significant number of DA white dwarfs have been found to exhibit narrow metallic absorption lines in their spectra. Those lines are generally attributed to "pollution" of the white dwarf atmospheres. Given that the diffusion time for metals within the atmospheres is short (tens to hundreds of years), the only reasonable means of maintaining such lines in ~20% of the DA population is to envisage continuous accretion from a surrounding debris disk. The present program aims to address this question by using COS to obtain UV observations of young white dwarfs, probing correlations with progenitor mass and examining the detailed composition of the accreted materials.

GO 12550: Physics and Chemistry of Condensate Clouds across the L/T Transition - A SNAP Spectral Mapping Survey

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. or leading to the generation of localised cloud features. Since the rotation periods for these obejcts are usually a matter of a few hours, the appearance and disappearance of asymmetric features might lead to periodic photometric or spectroscopic variability, and at least photometric variability has been detected for a handful of ultracool dwarfs. The clouds themselves may appear and disappear over relatively short timescales, leading to longer-term photometric variations at particular wavelengths. A Cycle 18 program (GO 12314) focuses on a handful of brown dwarfs near the L/T transition, using the WFC3 grism to obtain multi-orbit, high-accuracy monitoring of their spectral behaviour. That program succeeded in recovering significant variability, with periods from 5-10 hours. The present program builds on those results by extending coverage to a much larger sample of late-L/early-T dwarfs. As a SNAP prorgam, each will be observed for only ~40 minutes. insufficient to determine periodicities, but, given the high precision of HST, sufficient to identify new candidates and gain some insight into the frequenciy of the phenomenon.

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.