For millennia, humanity has pondered the origins of our universe. It was only a few decades ago that new inventions in the realm of space science, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, have provided faint, yet valuable insights into this origin story.
This year, its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, became operational. Among its first orders of business will be mapping the earliest structures of the universe. Jeyhan Kartaltepe is an astrophysicist in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. An expert in the area of galaxy formation and evolution, she is also the project lead of COSMOS-Web, the largest James Webb Space Telescope program to be observed in its first year of operations.
At Falling Walls, Kartaltepe explains how the design and coordination of mirrors in the telescope lead to a 100-fold improvement in image quality. She will also share some of the first scientific analyses of these breath-taking images, which provide us with a glimpse of what the universe looked like 250 million years after the Big Bang.