#HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE IMAGES 2003 PDF#

While the Hubble pictures aren't detailed enough to make out surface features, the striking differences in dark and bright regions suggest that Pluto has highly diversified terrain.Īnd by comparing the new pictures to previous images, astronomers can tell that some parts of Pluto, including the southern hemisphere, became significantly darker and redder between 20, while the northern hemisphere got brighter. (Related: ' Pluto Has 'Upside Down' Atmosphere.') The pictures reveal that Pluto is a much more dynamic body than commonly thought, and they offer astronomers ideas of what to focus on when the New Horizons spacecraft reaches the dwarf planet in 2015.Īs seen in the new pictures, Pluto's orange and gray hues could be the result of methane on the surface being broken down by sunlight, leaving a carbon-rich residue, the scientists say. 'If you were sitting in a spacecraft puttering around Pluto and looking out the window, this is what you'd see, but in higher resolution.' In a project that took four years and 20 computers running simultaneously, Buie and colleagues combined 384 Hubble pictures of Pluto to create what he calls 'my best guess at a true-color appearance' for the tiny world. The new Hubble shots, taken from 2002 to 2003, show rapid changes on Pluto's surface driven by the world's extreme seasons, lead investigator Marc Buie, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said today at a press briefing. Comparison of the submm galaxy morphologies with those of optically selected galaxies at z~2-3 reveal the submm galaxies to be a morphologically distinct population, with generally larger sizes, higher concentrations and more prevalent major-merger configurations.Swaths of white, dark orange, and charcoal gray dance across the surface of Pluto in the sharpest view yet of the dwarf planet, made possible by pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. Most strikingly, we find ~70% of the submm galaxies to be extraordinarily large and elongated relative to the field population, regardless of optical magnitude. We compare these morphological indices with those of other galaxies lying within the same STIS images.

We derive quantitative morphological information for the optical galaxies hosting the submm emission total and isophotal magnitudes, Petrosian radius, effective radius, concentration, aspect ratio, surface brightness, and asymmetry. The sizes and star formation rates of the submm galaxies are consistent with the maximal star formation rate densities of 20 Msun kpc^ in local starburst galaxies (Lehnert & Heckman 1996). The component separation in these objects are on average a factor two larger than local galaxies with similarly high bolometric luminosities. We find a predominance of irregular and complex morphologies in the sample, suggesting that mergers are likely common for submm galaxies.

#HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE IMAGES 2003 PDF#

Chapman and 4 other authors Download PDF Abstract: We present new Hubble Space Telescope STIS, high-resolution optical imaging of a sample of 13 submillimeter (submm) luminous galaxies, for which the optical emission has been pinpointed either through radio-1.4 GHz or millimeter interferometry. Download a PDF of the paper titled Hubble Space Telescope images of submillimeter sources: large, irregular galaxies at high redshift, by S.C.

Hubble space telescope images 2003