2023 Peterson Public Lecture
Dr. John Mather - NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Tuesday, October 3, 2023 @ 4:30 p.m.
In Person: Cardwell 101 or Streaming Here
The Mediasite platform for viewing the video will allow for questions to be asked virtually.Using the task bar at the bottom right corner of the screen, click on the 3 dots (ellipses) to see the “ask a question” prompt.
Opening the Infrared Treasure Chest with the James Webb Space Telescope
The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Dec. 25, 2021, and commissioning was completed in early July 2022. With its 6.5 m golden eye, and cameras and spectrometers covering 0.6 to 28 µm, Webb is already producing magnificent images of galaxies, active galactic nuclei, star-forming regions, and planets. Scientists are hunting for some of the first objects that formed after the Big Bang, the first black holes (primordial or formed in galaxies), and beginning to observe the growth of galaxies, the formation of stars and planetary systems, individual exoplanets through coronagraphy and transit spectroscopy, and all objects in the Solar System from Mars on out. It could observe a 1 cm2 bumblebee at the Earth-Moon distance, in reflected sunlight and thermal emission. I will show how we built the Webb and what we hope to find. Webb is a joint project of NASA with the European and Canadian space agencies.