Public Lecture
Pushing the Edge of the Cosmic Frontier with JWST
Jeyhan Kartaltepe
Rochester Institute of Technology
Wed, Aug 30, 5:30–6:30pm
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched in December 2021, first started collecting data in June 2022, and is already revolutionizing our understanding of the distant Universe. With its large segmented mirror, and optimization for infrared wavelengths, JWST was designed to detect and characterize some of the first galaxies to form in our universe and investigate how galaxies then evolve over the age of the Universe to the present day. In this talk, I will present how JWST has pushed our cosmic frontier beyond what was possible with Hubble and share some early results from extragalactic deep surveys and their implications for our understanding of the early universe.
About Jeyhan Kartaltepe
Jeyhan Kartaltepe is an astrophysicist in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She was born in San Antonio, Texas, then moved to different parts of the US for her BA, MS, PhD, and postdoc before settling in Rochester, New York. She is an expert in the area of galaxy formation and evolution and is interested in understanding how the first stars and galaxies in the universe formed and how various physical processes shaped their transformation into today's galaxies. She is a PI of COSMOS-Web, the largest James Webb Space Telescope program to be observed in its first year of operations, which will map out a large area of the sky in the near- and mid-infrared to study how galaxies in the early universe formed in relation to structures on large scales. She is also a leading co-I on the CEERS program, one of the first programs to obtain observations.
Heinz R. Pagels Public Lecture Series
Heinz R Pagels was a professor of physics at Rockefeller University, president of the New York Academy of Science, a trustee of the Aspen Institute, and a member of the Aspen Center for Physics for twenty years, serving as a participant, officer, and trustee. He was also President of the International League for Human Rights. His work on chaos theory inspired the character of Ian Malcolm in the Jurassic Park book and movies. A part-time local resident, Professor Pagels died here in a mountaineering accident in 1988. His family and friends instituted the lecture series in his honor because he devoted a substantial part of his life to effective public dissemination of scientific knowledge.
