The Large-Scale Structure of Debris Disks Newly Imaged with HST/STIS

We present the first HST/STIS broadband optical imaging results of ten young circumstellar disks, most in the Scorpius-Centaurus OB Association, following up initial resolved imaging by ground-based high-contrast instruments in the near infrared. We detected seven out of the ten targets from our sample using reference differential imaging. Of the three undetected targets, two (AK Sco and HD 143675) were known to have small angular extents and did not show scattered light beyond STIS’s inner working angle. In addition, no significant dust-scattered light was detected from the relatively faint HD 111161 disk. We focus our analyses on the five edge-on disks detected (GSC 07396-00759, HD 114082, HD 117214, HD 129590, and HD 146897) and one archival detection (HD 106906). Imaging these disks with HST/STIS allows us to detect the extended disk morphologies out to projected separations of ~800 au, which supplements previous ground-based detections of the inner disk and main planetesimal belt at Kuiper Belt-like scales. We measured surface brightness radial profiles using aperture photometry and power-law fitting. We find the midplane radial profiles to be mostly symmetric on large spatial scales, similar to results found closer in by ground-based imaging (with the exception of previously studied HD 106906). This work is supported by HST-GO-15653 provided by NASA through a grant from STScI under NASA contract NAS5-26555.