This week on HST

HST Programs: March 16 - March 22, 2015

Selected highlights

GO 13652: The frequency and chemical composition of rocky planetary debris around young white dwarfs: Plugging the last gaps

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 Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) is an ideal instrument for probing the abundance of trace elements in white dwarfs atmospheres: more than 70 systems have been observed, with detection rates running at around 50%. The presentSNAPSHOT program aims to cap pervious investigations by targeting white dwarfs with cooling ages of 5-25 Myrs and 100-300 Myrs: models suggest that planetary collisions should be frequent at the younger ages, when the parent stars have just completed extensive mass loss on the AGB.

GO 13767: Bright Galaxies at Hubble's Detection Frontier: The redshift z~9-10 BoRG pure-parallel survey

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). The highest redshift objects found in the UDF have redshifts approaching z~7. 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. Wide Field Camera 3, installed in Servicing Mission 4, is well suited to these observations, and a number of programs are in place in Cycle 17 that address these issues. Indeed, WFC3 is employed in pure parallel mode by several programs. These take advantage of other science programs, usually with COS, that involve 2-5 orbit pointings on sources at high galactic latitude. The WFC3 pointing is unplanned, since it depends on the orientation adopted for the prime observations, but 2-5 orbits of IR imaging can reach galaxies at redshifts exceeding z=7 (potentially even z~8) in high latitude fields. The present program builds on similar programs in Cycles 17 and 19, and aims to detect the brightest galaxies at z~9, within 600 Myrs of the Big Bang.

GO 13773: H-alpha LEGUS: Unveiling the Interplay Between Stars, Star Clusters, and Ionized Gas

UGC 4305 = Holmberg II - Arp 268, one of the star-forming galaxies targeted by LEGUS

Understanding the global architecture of star formation is a key step towards understanding the morphological evolution of galaxies and the characteristics of the underlying stellar populations. HST has devoted extensive resources to observations of nearby galaxies over its lifetime, including detailed surveys of a handful of systems, notably the PHAT survey of M31, with the enhanced imaging capabilities made available following SM4. Most programs, however, have focused on optical, far-red and, to a lesser extent, near-infrared wavelengths. While those observations provide high-quality colour-magnitude data that enable an exploration of relatively mature populations, they are less effective at probing active star-formation sites populated by young, high-mass stars. Those regions are most prominent at ultraviolet wavelengths. The HST LEGUS capitalises on the past heritage of HST observations by adding near-UV imaging for 50 nearby galaxies, drawn from a catalogue of 400 systems within ~11 Mpc of the Milky Way. They have been selected to provide a fair sampling of the wide variety of galactic systems within that volume. LEGUS itself is imaging star-forming regions at near-UV and blue wavelengths using the WFC3 UVIS channel with the F275W, F336W and F438W filters, supplemented by F55W and F814W (V and I) where necessary. The present program builds on that foundation by adding WFC3 narrow-band (F657N) H-alpha imaging of 32 galaxies from the sample.

GO 13834: The Proper Motion Field along the Magellanic Bridge: a New Probe of the LMC-SMC interaction

The Large Magellanic Cloud (upper left) with the Small Magellanic Cloud (right) and the (foreground) Galactic globular cluster47 Tucanae

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) are the most massive satellites of the Milky Way galaxy. The orbital motions of these systems can be used to probe the mass distribution of Milky Way, and backtracking the orbits can shed light on how the three systems have interacted, In particular, the well known Magellanic Stream, stretching between the two Clouds, is thought to be a product either of interactions between the Clouds, or of ram-stripping of gas from the LMC on its last passage through the Plane of the Milky Way. Understanding the full scope of the interactions demands knowledge of the tangential motions of these systems - that is, proper motion measurements. Given the distances of the Clouds (~50 kpc.), the actual motions amount to only a few milliarcseconds, but the high spatial resolution and high stability of HST imaging makes such measurements possible. Past observing programs (eg GO 11730) have concentrated on the LMC, using the now-defunct ACS High Resolution Camera (ACS/HRC), the Planetary Camera on WFPC2 and the UVIS camera on WFC3 to target known QSOs lying behind the Clouds; the QSOs serve as fixed reference points for absolute astrometry of the numerous foreground LMC/SMC stars. A recent Cycle 21 program focused on the SMC, targeting 30 newly identified background QSos for WFC3 observations over a two-year period. The present program expands observations to several fields along the Magellanic bridge, a complex of gas and stars that conencts the two clouds, and will test the hypothsesis that the clouds are undergoing their first interaction with teh Milky Way.