FITS images of HST debris disks

Existing studies have investigated a small set of individual systems across a variety of imaging instruments and filters, calling for uniform comparison studies to systematically investigate dust properties. We obtain the surface brightness of dust particles in debris disks by post-processing coronagraphic imaging observations, and compare the multi-wavelength reflectance of dust.

For a sample of resolved debris disks, we perform a systematic analysis on the reflectance properties of their birth rings. We reduced the visible and near-infrared images of 23 debris disk systems hosted by A through M stars using two coronagraphs onboard the Hubble Space Telescope: the STIS instrument observations centering at 0.58um, and the NICMOS instrument at 1.12um or 1.60um. For proper recovery of debris disks, we used classical reference differential imaging for STIS, and adopted non-negative matrix factorization with forward modeling for NICMOS.