CFHT UM2025 - Presentation Details
Abstract Details
Title: Probing solar system rings and atmospheres using WIRCam at CFHT
Presenter: Damya Souami
Abstract:
The occultation of October 2021 by the Neptunian system was the first large campaign to probe Neptune's atmosphere and its surroundings since the period 1980-1990. This campaign involved large IR facilities with fast cameras in North and South Americas, as well as in Hawaii. We observed this event with WIRCam/Ks at CFHT. We take the opportunity of this CFHT Users’ meeting to report on our near final results of the probing of Neptune’s stratosphere (paper in prep.), after about one neptunian season elapsed since the 1980's. Moreover, a few months later (August 2022), the best occultation ever by the trans-Neptunian object (50000) Quaoar was observed by WIRCAM/Ks. It led to the discovery of a second ring outside Quaoar's Roche limit, and provided for the first time a resolved radial profile of the dense part of the main ring. When compared with the profiles obtained simultaneously by Keck in the visible, it shows that the latter is formed of macroscopic particles (Pereira et al. 2023). Reference: Pereira, C.L., Sicardy, B., Morgado, B.E., Braga-Ribas, F., Fernandez-Valenzuela, E., Souami, D., et al.: 2023, Astronomy and Astrophysics 673, L4. doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202346365. Acknowledgements: ”The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.” The data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. NIRCam was built by a team at the University of Arizona (UofA) and Lockheed Martin’s Ad- vanced Technology Center, led by Prof. Marcia Rieke at UoA. This work was partially funded by the European Research Council under the European Commu- nity’s H2020 (2014 - 2021/ERC Grant Agreement No. 669416). This work was supported by the France-USA Fulbright Commission, which supported D.S.’s work on the subject as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California in Berkeley.