This week on HST

HST Programs: March 24 - March 30, 2008

Some selected highlights

GO 11169: Collisons in the Kuiper Belt

Visions of the Kuiper Belt

The Kuiper Belt lies beyond the orbit of Neptune, extending from ~30 AU to ~50 AU from the Sun, and includes at least 70,000 objects with diameters exceeding 100 km. Setting aside Pluto, the first trans-Neptunian objects were discovered in the early 1990s. Most are relatively modest in size, with diameters of a few hundred km and photometric properties that suggested an icy composition, similar to Pluto and its main satellite, Charon. Over the last three years, however, a handful of substantially larger bodies have been discovered, with diameters of more than 1000 km; indeed, one object, Eris (2003 UB13), is slightly larger than Pluto (2320 km) and 25% more massive. We know the mass for Eris because it has a much lower mass companion, Dysnomia, which orbits Eris with a period of 16 days (see this recent press release ). Pluto, itself, has three companions: Charon, which is about 1/7th the mass of Pluto, and the much smaller bodies, Hydra and Nix, discovered from HST observations in early 2005. Observations of other Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), mainly using HST, reveal that a significant fraction are binary. This may indicate that the Kuiper Belt is a dangerous place to live, with frequent collisions between KBOs, leading to fragmentation and satellite formation. The present program aims to probe this issue through multi-wavelength observations of a substantial number of KBOs, sampling a broad range of properties.

GO 11195: Morphologies of the Most Extreme High-Redshift Mid-IR-luminous Galaxies II: The `Bump' Sources

HST images of interacting ultra-luminous IR galaxies

Luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs) are systems that have total luminosities exceeding 1011.4 LSun, with most of the energy emitted at wavelengths longward of 10 microns. Many (perhaps most) of these galaxies are interacting or merging disk galaxies, with the excess infrared luminosity generated by warm dust associated with the extensive star formation regions. Many systems also exhibit an active nucleus, and may be in the process of evolving towards an S0 or elliptical merger remnant. Until recently, very few candidate such systems were known at high redshifts; consequently, analyses and investigations of their origins had to rely on observations of low- and moderate-redshift analogues. The team leading this HST proposal have used a combination of mid-infrared (24 micron) and near-infrared observations to identify tens of candidates, and Spitzer follow-up spectroscopy has confirmed that many lie at redshifts 2 < z < 2.5. The sources appear to fall into two broad categories: thopse with bright 24-micron fluxes with power-law spectral energy distributions and SiO absorption at mid-IR wavelengths; and "bump" sources, with an SED that peaks near 1.6 microns (rest wavelength) and PAH absorption. The brighter sources were targeted in a Cycle 15 program; the present program uses NICMOS and WFPC2 to obtain high sensitivity, high angular-resolution observations of 22 of the "bymp" systems.

GO 11210: The Architecture of Exoplanetary Systems

Artist's impression of a young planetary system

Immanuel Kant is generally credited with first proposing that the planets in the Solar System coalesced from a flat, rotating disk formed by the Solar Nebula. Direct confirmation of that process only came in the early 1990s, when millimetre-wave interferometers were able to detect molecular gas in Keplerian rotation around a handful of nearby young stars. Since then, there have been numerous other observations, including Hubble's images of proplyds (protoplanetary disks) in the Orion Cluster, and Hubble and Spitzer observations of edge-on disks in other young stars. One of the clear selling points of the Solar Nebula disk model is that it appears to offer a natural path to forming planets with coplanar orbits, matching (most of) our observations of the Solar System. On the other hand, as our knowledge of exoplanetary systems has accumulated over the last decade, it has become clear that dynamical interactions may play a very important role in the evolution of these systems. In particular, disk/planet interactions are generally regarded as responsible for the inward migration of gas giants to form hot Jupiters in <3 day period orbits. Planet-planet interactions could lead to significant changes in orbital inclination. Radial velocity planet searches are uncovering more and more multi-planet systems. This program focuses the high precision of HST's astrometric detectors, the Fine Guidance Sensors, on four of those systems. The aim is to complement the existing radial velocity measurements with sub-milliarcsecond precision astrometry, allowing determination of the true orbital paths - specifically, the relative inclination - of the low-mass objects in these systems.

GO 11213: Distances to Eclipsing M Dwarf Binaries

Artist's impression of a cool binary system

Eclipsing binaries are stellar systems where the orbital plane lies in the line of sight, leading to the components undergoing mutual eclipses. These systems are extremely powerful probes of stellar properties, since (given the appropriate radial velocity measurements) they permit direct measurement of both stellar masses and radii. Accurate distances can also be derived from these systems. These results are particularly interesting for stars near the bottom of the main sequence, approaching the hydrogen buyrning limit. The present program aims to use the Fine Guidance Sensors on HST to determine sub-milliarcsecond trigonometric parallaxes for five M-dwarf binaries: YY Gem, GU Boo, CM Dra, NSVS0103 and TRES-HER0-R