Overview of the ULLYSES Director's Discretionary HST program
Abstract
The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) Director has decided to devote up to 1000 orbits of Director's Discretionary time in observing Cycles 27-29 to a new Hubble ultraviolet legacy program focused on star formation and associated stellar physics. This new program, ULLYSES (UV Legacy Library of Young Stars as Essential Standards), will provide a UV spectroscopic reference sample of young (< 10 Myr) high- and low-mass stars. Using COS and STIS, ULLYSES will target over ~150 OB stars in the Magellanic Clouds and lower metallicity galaxies in the Local Group, and ~40 T Tauri stars and brown dwarfs in the Milky Way. In addition, ULLYSES will monitor 4 typical T Tauri stars over different rotational phases through at least three rotation periods, and over timescales of months to years. The resulting library will provide template spectra of massive stars that significantly enhance coverage of the low-metallicity regime, while the low mass sample will cover a wide range of ages, accretion rates, and masses, including objects with masses well below 0.5 M⊙, and as low as 0.05 M⊙. The legacy of this large UV dataset on the first 10 Myr of stellar evolution will be enhanced by complementary datasets obtained by the scientific community. In addition to the core goals of the program related to the stellar astrophysics of low and high mass stars, these data will also enable exciting science in the fields of ISM, CGM, jets, and exoplanets. As with previous Director's Discretionary programs, all data obtained will be non-proprietary. The implementation team at STScI is developing high-level science data products and a sophisticated database and website for disseminating data from the ULLYSES program and its ancillary datasets from other facilities. As the lead of the implementation team at STScI, I will give an overview of the objectives, design, selected targets, observing strategy, and expected data products of the program, and provide an update on the status of the implementation.
- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #235
- Pub Date:
- January 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AAS...23523203R