This week on HST

HST Programs: June 23 - June 29, 2014

Selected highlights

GO 12965:Properties and dynamics of the upper atmosphere of the hot-Neptune GJ 436b

Artist's impression of the exo-Neptune in orbit around Gliese 436

Gliese 436 is an early-type M dwarf (spectral type M2.5) with a mass approximately 40% that of the Sun lying at a distance of ~10 parsecs. In August 2004, the Lick/Carnegie planet search team (led by Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler) announced the discovery of a ~22 Earth-mass planet in a 2.64 day orbit around this star. Unlike most "hot jupiters", this "hot Neptune", one of the first such objects discovered, is on an elliptical orbit, e=0.16, which, with a semi-major axis of 0.0278 AU, brings it within 3.5 million kilometres of the central star. Gl 436 is significantly cooler than the Sun, with a surface temperature close to ~3400 degrees Kelvin; even so, the "surface" temperatures on Gl 436b are expected to reach ~740 K (~370 C). In May of 2007, a team led by F. Pont demonstrated that Gl 436b transits the parent star. The initial ground-based observations allowed them to derive a diameter approximately 4 times that of Earth, directly comparable with Uranus and Neptune. Follow-up observations with NICMOS and FGS on HST and with IRAC on Spitzer refined the radius measurement to 4.9 Earth radii. This provides key insight into the likely origins of Gl 436b, since combining the diameter with the measured mass gives the mean density, and, by inference, the likely composition. For Gl 436b, the indications are that the planet is a displaced "ice giant". The present program aims to probe the atmospheric structure by using STIS to searching for Lyman alpha absorption that might be the signature of evaporation driven by stellar irradiation.

GO 13315: Pluto Satellite 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 fainter magnitudes to both better characterise the P4 and P5 orbits and search for even fainter moons.

GO 13467: Follow The Water: The Ultimate WFC3 Exoplanet Atmosphere Survey

Probing the atmosphere of a transiting exoplanet

The first exoplanet, 51 Peg b, was discovered in 1995 through high-precision radial velocity measurements. 51 Pegb was followed by a trickle, and then a flood of other discoveries, as astronomers realised that there were other solar systems radically different from our own, where "hot jupiters" led to short-period, high-amplitude velocity variations. Then, in 1999, came the inevitable discovery that one of those hot jupiters. HD 209458b, was in an orbit aligned with our line of sight to the star, resulting in transits. Since that date, the number of known transiting exoplanet systems has grown to more than 400 in over 300 planetary systems, with the overwhelming majority identified by the Kepler satellite, which has also contributed close to 3,000 additional (very strong) candidates. As these observations have accumulated,the broad diversity of exoplanet systems has become increasingly apparent. Transiting systems are invaluable, since they provide not only unambiguous measurements of mass and diameter, but also an opportunity to probe the atmospheric structure by differencing spectra taken during and between primary secondary transit. Such observations are best done from space: indeed, while high-precision ground-based observations have succeeded in constraining atmospheric properties in a few systems, the only successful detections of atmospheric features to date have been with HST and Spitzer. HST capabilities have been enhanced in the last few years with addition of spatial scanning, moving the target star over the chip in a controlled fashion during an observation. This allows observers to accumulate images or spectra of substantially higher signal-to-noise, a crucial advantage if one is looking for flux differences of elss than 1 part in 104. Past programs have accumulated observations of over a dozen exoplanets, using STIS at optical wavelengths and WFC3 in the near-infrared. The present program targets eight exoplanet systems with a diverse range of properties: HD 209458b,GL 3470b, HAT-P-26b, WASP-12b, WASP-18b, WASP-43b, WASP-80b and WASP-19b. The WFC3-IR G141 grism will be used to search for the characteristic near-infrared spectral features due to water in the amospheres of these exoplanets.

GO 13517: WISP - A Survey of Star Formation Across Cosmic Time

A region of massive star formation

Star formation is the key astrophysical process in determining the overall evolution of galactic systems, the generation of heavy elements, and the overall enrichment of interstellar and intergalactic material. Tracing the overall evolution through a wide redshift range is crucial to understanding how gas and stars evolved to form the galaxies that we see around us now. The present program builds on the ability of HST to carry out parallel observations, using more than one instrument. While the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph is focused on obtaining ultraviolet spectra of unparalleled signal-to-noise, this program uses the near-infrared grisms mounted on the Wide-Field Camera 3 infrared channel to obtain low resolution spectra between 1 and 1.6 microns of randomly-selected nearby fields. The goal is to search for emission lines characteristic of star-forming regions. In particular, these observations are capable of detecting Lyman-alpha emission generated by star formation at redshifts z > 5.6. A total of up to 40 "deep" (4-5 orbit) and 20 "shallow" (2-3 orbit) fields will be targeted in the course of this observing campaign.