Cafe Scientifique: The James Webb Space Telescope is actually a time machine

Cafe Scientifique Annapolis presents a talk by Dr. L. Y. Aaron Yung, NASA Postdoctoral Fellow, Observational Cosmology Lab, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

The long-anticipated James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), NASA’s next generation flagship observatory, is set to be launched on Dec 18, 2021. Given its unprecedented sensitivity, JWST is expected to routinely find faint galaxies that are up to billions of light-years away. The galaxy light that traversed across the universe to reach Earth is encoded with messages about their sources as they were emitted billions of years ago. And by decoding messages from large populations of galaxies at various distances, scientists will be able to reconstruct our Universe’s past history, as well as how galaxies formed and evolved over time. Dr. Yung will give an overview on JWST’s mission timeline and briefly highlight a handful of most anticipated survey programs.