Hidden Treasures in Hubble Images

A new processing technique has revealed once-invisible planetary disks encircling five stars 

imaged in Hubble’s archive.

The two images at top reveal debris disks around young stars uncovered in archival images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer observed the disks in near-infrared light in 2007. Astronomers used a coronagraph to block out the bright light from each star so they could analyze the faint, reflected light off dust particles in the disks. The illustration beneath each image depicts the orientation of the debris disks. Astronomers retrieved these images from the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) and used more powerful image analysis techniques to search for planetary systems. NASA / ESA / R. Soummer and A. Feild (STScI) 

More than two decades of Hubble observations have produced more than 45 terabytes of 

data, enough to fill more than 90 MacBook Pro laptops. Thanks to the wealth of information 

stored in the Hubble data archive, astronomers can easily revisit old observations with new 

image processing techniques to make additional discoveries

.

The two stars pictured above, HD 141943 and HD 191089, were initially targeted because of 

their unusual infrared heat signatures. But while the original images provided tantalizing clues 

that the stars might have planetary disks — dusty planes where planets form — no disks were 

detected

.

Recent improvements in image processing, however, made the invisible visible

.

A team led by Rémi Soummer (Space Telescope Science Institute) developed new methods of

data analysis, including algorithms initially used in face-recognition software, to reanalyze the 

archived images. This time, they saw clear debris disks around the two stars above and three 

more, increasing the total number of planetary disks seen in scattered light from 18 to 23.

"I remember we tried it, and we thought, 'It's not possible. We've done something wrong!' The

 disks popped out immediately," says Soummer in a press release. "It worked so well, and the 

results came up so quickly, that at first we didn't believe them."

The team will next search for structures in the disks that would suggest forming planets. They 

will also use their new image processing technique with the James Webb Space Telescope,

 slated to launch in 2017, which will shed further light on these once-invisible disks.