We present 340 nm continuum and (O II) line images of the nuclear region of the radio galaxy Cygnus A at 0.1 sec resolution. At this high resolution the northwestern of the two nuclear components is resolved into two separate, line emitting subcomponents, and the radio jet points accurately between them. This suggests that the radio jet has blasted a path through emission-line clouds, and that the emission line clouds, having cooled after the passage of the shock, are being photoionized by a (presumably hidden) central source or by the shock itself. We confirm previous detections of a small component at a location corresponding to the radio nuclear position and discuss the evidence for a possible bifurcation of the emission region on the unseen 'counterjet' side.
We present observations of the first two supernovae discovered with the recently installed Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The supernovae were found in Wide Field Camera images of the Hubble Deep Field-North taken with the F775W, F850LP, and G800L optical elements as part of the ACS guaranteed time observation program. Spectra extracted from the ACS G800L grism exposures confirm that the objects are Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) at redshifts z = 0.47 and 0.95. Follow-up HST observations have been conducted with ACS in F775W and F850LP and with the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer in the near-infrared F110W bandpass, yielding a total of nine flux measurements in the three bandpasses over a period of 50 days in the observed frame. We discuss many of the important issues in doing accurate photometry with the ACS. We analyze the multiband light curves using two different fitting methods to calibrate the supernova luminosities and place them on the SNe Ia Hubble diagram. The resulting distances are consistent with the redshift-distance relation of the accelerating universe model, although evolving intergalactic gray dust remains as a less likely possibility. The relative ease with which these SNe Ia were found, confirmed, and monitored demonstrates the potential ACS holds for revolutionizing the field of high-redshift SNe Ia and therefore of testing the accelerating universe cosmology and constraining the "epoch of deceleration."
A subset of the polarized images from calibration proposals 9586, 9661, and 10055 were analyzed to help determine the polarization calibration accuracy level of the ACS camera. The polarization values found here are shown to be accurate to better than 1%. The absolute throughput values found while performing these calibration exercises did not match those currently listed in the synphot/ETC database, and we recommend these be updated in the system. Lastly, we examine the differences between two weighting schemes used in the multidrizzle software. The exposure time weighting, EXP, is found to more accurately preserve the flux levels than the error weighting scheme, ERR, for datasets with a small number of images being combined.
As one of the most luminous Cepheids in the Milky Way, the 41.5-day RS Puppis is an analog of the long-period Cepheids used to measure extragalactic distances. An accurate distance to this star would therefore help anchor the zero-point of the bright end of the period-luminosity relation. But, at a distance of about 2 kpc, RS Pup is too far away for measuring a direct trigonometric parallax with a precision of a few percent with existing instrumentation. RS Pup is unique in being surrounded by a reflection nebula, whose brightness varies as pulses of light from the Cepheid propagate outwards. We present new polarimetric imaging of the nebula obtained with HST/ACS. The derived map of the degree of linear polarization pL allows us to reconstruct the three-dimensional structure of the dust distribution. To retrieve the scattering angle from the pL value, we consider two different polarization models, one based on a Milky Way dust mixture and one assuming Rayleigh scattering. Considering the derived dust distribution in the nebula, we adjust a model of the phase lag of the photometric variations over selected nebular features to retrieve the distance of RS Pup. We obtain a distance of 1910 +/- 80 pc (4.2%), corresponding to a parallax of 0.524 +/- 0.022 mas. The agreement between the two polarization models we considered is good, but the final uncertainty is dominated by systematics in the adopted model parameters. The distance we obtain is consistent with existing measurements from the literature, but light echoes provide a distance estimate that is not subject to the same systematic uncertainties as other estimators (e.g. the Baade-Wesselink technique). RS Pup therefore provides an important fiducial for the calibration of systematic uncertainties of the long-period Cepheid distance scale.
We report new results from an HST archival program to study proper motions in the optical jet of the nearby radio galaxy M87. Using over 13 years of archival imaging, we reach accuracies below 0.1c in measuring the apparent velocities of individual knots in the jet. We confirm previous findings of speeds up to 4.5c in the inner 6" of the jet, and report new speeds for optical components in the outer part of the jet. We find evidence of significant motion transverse to the jet axis on the order of 0.6c in the inner jet features, and superluminal velocities parallel and transverse to the jet in the outer knot components, with an apparent ordering of velocity vectors possibly consistent with a helical jet pattern. Previous results suggested a global deceleration over the length of the jet in the form of decreasing maximum speeds of knot components from HST-1 outward, but our results suggest that superluminal speeds persist out to knot C, with large differentials in very nearby features all along the jet. We find significant apparent accelerations in directions parallel and transverse to the jet axis, along with evidence for stationary features in knots D, E, and I. These results are expected to place important constraints on detailed models of kpc-scale relativistic jets.
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