Credit: IMAGE: NASA, ESA, and R. Soummer and A. Feild (STScI); SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, R. Soummer (STScI), and the ALICE Team
FINDING DERIS DISKS IN HUBBLE ARCHIVAL DATA.
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 than previously applied to
these data to search for planetary systems.