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February 1, 2023 past

JWST: From First Light to First Science

538 Davey Lab and https://psu.zoom.us/j/92637070419

JWST: From First Light to First Science

Marshall Perrin
Abstract: After decades of development by a globe-spanning team, JWST is now providing an unprecedented view of the cosmos. In this talk I will describe our experience thus far operating this new great observatory: from mission design history and development, to prelaunch preparations, to launch and commissioning, and now into the first of many years of mission operations at the Earth-Sun L2 point. I will provide a first-hand look at the processes and teamwork we used to deploy the observatory and align its segmented mirror system, and discuss some of the surprises (both challenges and good news) encountered during commissioning. Even from early in telescope commissioning, this observatory's tremendous power and sensitivity were already apparent with spectacular images and spectra. Now during science operations, we continue to learn more about observatory hardware performance; this is still early days in our adventure with JWST. I will close with a look at (a small fraction of) some of the early science results with JWST, with particular attention to our early imaging observations of nearby exoplanetary systems.

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2023-02-01 15:45 Marshall Perrin JWST: From First Light to First Science
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.