Event Summary

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), after decades of planning, has finally launched and is fulfilling its destiny of revolutionizing all areas of astronomy. The telescope was built with the primary science goal of observing the “First Light in the Universe”. The early universe is ripe with exciting questions - when did the first galaxies form? What were they like? How did the first super-massive black holes form? Data from JWST is now answering these questions, and providing new puzzles. Our speaker, Steven Finkelstein of the University of Texas, will describe why we are so curious about the early universe, highlight the exciting technological achievements represented by JWST, and highlight some of our early findings. He will conclude by describing the Giant Magellan Telescope, now being constructed in the foothills of the Chilean Andes, which will be one of the largest ground-based telescopes upon completion early in the next decade.

Speaker

Steven Finkelstein, Professor, Department of Astronomy, UT Austin

Steven Finkelstein is a Professor and the Isabel McCutcheon Harte Centennial Chair in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as the Director of the Cosmic Frontier Center. He grew up in Seattle, and received a bachelor's of science in physics and astronomy from the University of Washington in 2003 and a Ph.D. in physics from Arizona State University in 2008. From 2008-2011, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University, followed by a Hubble Fellowship at The University of Texas at Austin in 2011, where he became faculty in 2012. His research focuses on the discovery and characterization of the most distant galaxies in the universe, with an emphasis on studying their evolution from that distant epoch to today.  He is a leader in the observational discovery of very distant galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope, and followup observations of these galaxies with the world’s largest ground-based telescopes.  He is married to Dr. Keely Finkelstein, who is an Associate Professor of Instruction in the department, and they have a 14 year old son and 10 year old daughter together.