| Program Number | Principal Investigator | Program Title |
|---|---|---|
| 12112 | Julianne Dalcanton, University of Washington | A Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury - I |
| 12192 | James T. Lauroesch, University of Louisville Research Foundation, Inc. | A SNAPSHOT Survey of Interstellar Absorption Lines |
| 12451 | Marc Postman, Space Telescope Science Institute | Through a Lens, Darkly - New Constraints on the Fundamental Components of the Cosmos |
| 12461 | Adam Riess, The Johns Hopkins University | Supernova Follow-up for MCT |
| 12464 | Kevin France, University of Colorado at Boulder | Project MUSCLES: Measuring the Ultraviolet Spectral Characteristics in Low-mass Exoplanetary Systems |
| 12468 | Keith S. Noll, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center | How Fast Did Neptune Migrate? A Search for Cold Red Resonant Binaries |
| 12471 | Dawn K. Erb, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee | The Bottom of the Iceberg: Faint z~2 Galaxies and the Enrichment of the IGM |
| 12482 | Jean-Michel Desert, California Institute of Technology | Relative atmospheric compositions and metallicities of a multi-planet system |
| 12488 | Mattia Negrello, Open University | SNAPshot observations of gravitational lens systems discovered via wide-field Herschel imaging |
| 12498 | Richard S. Ellis, California Institute of Technology | Did Galaxies Reionize the Universe? |
| 12517 | Francesco R. Ferraro, Universita di Bologna | COSMIC-LAB: Hunting for optical companions to binary MSPs in Globular Clusters |
| 12519 | Raghvendra Sahai, Jet Propulsion Laboratory | Newly Discovered LMC Preplanetary Nebulae as Probes of Stellar Evolution |
| 12521 | Xin Liu, University of California - Los Angeles | The Frequency and Demographics of Dual Active Galactic Nuclei |
| 12528 | Philip Massey, Lowell Observatory | Probing the Nature of LBVs in M31 and M33: Blasts from the Past |
| 12530 | Alex V. Filippenko, University of California - Berkeley | Early-Time UV Spectroscopy of a Stripped-Envelope Supernova: A New Window |
| 12546 | R. Brent Tully, University of Hawaii | The Geometry and Kinematics of the Local Volume |
| 12550 | Daniel Apai, University of Arizona | Physics and Chemistry of Condensate Clouds across the L/T Transition - A SNAP Spectral Mapping Survey |
| 12568 | Matthew A. Malkan, University of California - Los Angeles | WFC3 Infrared Spectroscopic Parallel Survey WISP: A Survey of Star Formation Across Cosmic Time |
| 12596 | Brian E. Wood, Naval Research Laboratory | In Search of a Young Solar Wind |
| 12667 | Andrea M. Ghez, University of California - Los Angeles | Kinematic Reconstruction of the Origin and IMF of the Massive Young Clusters at the Galactic Center |
| 12879 | Adam Riess, The Johns Hopkins University | A 1% Measurement of the Distance Scale with Perpendicular Spatial Scanning |
GO 12105, 12112: A Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury
M31: the Andromeda spiral galaxy |
M31, the Andromeda galaxy, is the nearest large spiral system to the Milky Way (d ~ 700 kpc), and, with the Milky Way, dominates the Local Group. The two galaxies are relatively similar, with M31 likely the larger system; thus, Andromeda provides the best opportunity for a comparative assessment of the structural properties of the Milky Way. Moreover, while M31 is (obviously) more distant, our external vantage point can provide crucial global information that complements the detailed data that we can acquire on individual members of the stellar populations of the Milky Way. With the advent on the ACS and, within the last 2 years, WFC3 on HST, it has become possible to resolve main sequence late-F and G dwarfs, permitting observations that extend to sub-solar masses in M31's halo and disk. Initially, most attention focused on the extended halo of M31 (eg the Cycle 15 program GO 10816 ), with deep imaging within a limited number of fields revealing the complex metallicity structure within that population. With the initiation of the present Multi-Cycle Treasury program, attention switches to the M31 disk. "PHAT" is conducting a multi-waveband survey of approximately one third of disk and bulge, focusing on the north-east quadrant. Observations extend over Cycles 19, 20 and 21, and will provide a thorough census of upper main-sequence stars, open clusters, associations and star forming regions, matching the stellar distribution against the dust and gas distribution. |
A map of the Local Stellar Neighbourhood
|
Understanding the nature and structure of gas within the interstellar medium is a key step towards understanding how material is recycled and how energetic processes, such as stellar winds and outflows, feed energy into the overall system. UV spectroscopy plays a key role in probing these effects: hot, background objects that produce relatively few intrinsic absorption features serve to map the the velocities and temperatures within the intervening gas along the line of sight. Observations of quasars are used to probe galaxy halos at moderate and high redshift; observations of hot stars provide similar information for gas in the Milky Way. The present program is using high-resolution, echelle observations with STIS to target O and B stars with a few kpc of the Sun, probing the interstellar medium along the line of sight. All of these stars have prior low-resolution observations at far-UV wavelengths with FUSE, providing a reliable guide to the flux levels. The overall goal is to determine the density, temperature and abundance distributions within the ISM along a wide variety of sight-lines throught the Galacic disk and inner halo. |
GO 12468: How Fast Did Neptune Migrate? A Search for Cold Red Resonant Binaries
Preliminary orbital determination for the KBO WW31, based on C. Veillet's analysis of CFHT observations; the linked image shows the improved orbital derivation, following the addition of HST imaging |
The Kuiper Belt consists of icy planetoids that orbit the Sun within a broad band stretching from Neptune's orbit (~30 AU) to distance sof ~50 AU from the Sun (see David Jewitt's Kuiper Belt page for details). Over 500 KBOs (or trans-Neptunian objects, TNOs) are currently known out of a population of perhaps 70,000 objects with diameters exceeding 100 km. Approximately 2% of the known TNOs are binary (including Pluto, one of the largest known TNOs, regardless of whether one considers it a planet or not). TNOs are grouped within three broad classes: resonant objects, whose orbits are in m,ean motion resonance with Neptune, indicating capture; scattered objects, whose current orbits have evolved through gravitational interactions with Neptune or other giant planets; and classical TNOs, which are on low eccentricity orbits beyond Neptune, with no orbital resonance with any giant planet. The latter clas are further sub-divided into "hot" and "cold" objects, depending on whether the orbits have high or low inclinations with respect to the ecliptic. Cold, classical TNOs show relatively uniform characteristcis, including red colours, high albedos and an extremely high binary fraction (>30%). They are believed to have formed in situ, and were therefore in place to experience the range of gravitational interactions as the giant planets migrated to their present location. As that migration occurred, subsets are expected to have been trapped in transitory resonance orbits. The present proposal aims to use HST to complete a photometric survey of all known resonant TNOs, with the goal of identifying the proportion of cold classical TNOs that have been captured. The relative number of such objects can be used to constrain models for Neptune's orbital migration in the early Solar System. |
GO 12498: Did galaxies reionize the universe?
 The ACS optical/far-red image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field |
Galaxy evolution in the early Universe is a discipline of astronomy that has been transformed by observations with the Hubble Space Telescope. The original Hubble Deep Field, the product of 10 days observation in December 1995 of a single pointing of Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, demonstrated conclusively that galaxy formation was a far from passive process. The images revealed numerous blue disturbed and irregular systems, characteristic of star formation in galaxy collisions and mergers. Building on this initial progam, the Hubble Deep Field South (HDFS) provided matching data for a second southern field, allowing a first assessment of likely effects due to field to field cosmic variance, and the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (UDF) probed to even fainter magitude with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). Pushing to larger distances, and greater ages, demands observatons at near-infrared wavelengths, as the characteristics signatures of star formation are driven further redward in the spectrum. The installation of Wide-Field Camera 3 during Servicing Mission 4 opened up this regime, through observations using the WFC3-IR camera in the F105W (J) and F160W (H) filters. Those observations provided the first candidate galaxy at redshift z=10. However, that individual detection - and even the 10s of gaalxies detected at z=7 to 8 - represent only the most luminous galaxies at those redshifts, and provide only limited constraints on the total star formation at those epochs. The present program will add a further 128 orbits centred on the UDF, primarily in the F105W and F140W filters. These observations will push the detection limits to fainter apparent magnitudes, and to lower luminosity galaxies, setting stronger constraints on the total star formation in the early universe. |