A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: glimpsing the Cosmic Dawn with the James Webb Space Telescope
Date: Monday 7th February 2022
Time: 7:00pm
Venue: via Zoom: details to follow
Speaker: Martin Hendry
In December 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched from French Guiana on a million-mile journey to its final orbit – from which it will revolutionise our view of the distant universe. With a 6.5m wide mirror, JWST is much larger than the Hubble Space Telescope, and will probe even deeper into the cosmos, searching for the light from the very earliest stars and galaxies. Join University of Glasgow astronomer Martin Hendry as he tells the story of JWST: the infra-red technology behind this remarkable space telescope, the extraordinary engineering challenges that were faced in getting it to orbit and the big science questions about the origin and evolution of the universe that we hope it will help us to answer.
Martin Hendry is Professor of Gravitational Astrophysics and Cosmology at the University of Glasgow. He is a senior member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), the global team of more than 1400 scientists which made the first ever detection of gravitational waves in 2015 – a discovery that was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics – and a leading advocate of the new field of multi-messenger astronomy, that seeks to combine information from gravitational-wave detectors and from electromagnetic telescopes like JWST. In 2015 Martin was also awarded the MBE for his services to the public understanding of science. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Zoom Details to follow