First Friday Astronomy: Opening the Infrared Treasure Chest with JWST

Join the Boise State Physics Department for our First Friday Astronomy Event:
Friday, November 1st, 7:30pm in the Boise State Student Union Building, Jordan Ballroom. 

Dr. John Mather, Recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, Senior Astrophysicist, NASA GSFC and former JWST Senior Project Scientist, will present: “Opening the Infrared Treasure Chest with JWST”.

These events are funded by your generous donations. You can donate at boi.st/AstronomyCampaign.

More details coming soon for opportunities to meet with Dr. Mather.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Dec. 25, 2021, and commissioning was completed in early July 2022. With its 6.5 m golden eye, and cameras and spectrometers covering 0.6 to 28 µm, Webb is already producing magnificent images and surprises about galaxies, active galactic nuclei, star-forming regions, and planets. It extends the scientific discoveries of the great Hubble, and ties the most distant galaxies to their origin story from the fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Scientists are hunting for some of the first objects that formed after the Big Bang, the first black holes (primordial or formed in galaxies), and beginning to observe the growth of galaxies, the formation of stars and planetary systems, individual exoplanets through coronography and transit spectroscopy, and all objects in the Solar System from Mars on out. It could observe a 1 cm 2 bumblebee at the Earth-Moon distance, in reflected sunlight and thermal emission. Dr. Mather will show how we built the Webb, why we study infrared, and the most exciting current discoveries. Webb is a joint project  of NASA with the European and Canadian space agencies.

The event is free and open to the public.

Events Details:

Date: Friday, November 1st

Time: 7:30 p.m. MT (doors open at 6:30 p.m. MT)

Location: Boise State Student Union Building – Jordan Ballroom

For those that cannot attend in person, the lecture will be live-streamed on Youtube at boi.st/astrobroncoslive. Those attending the live-stream are welcome and encouraged to ask questions via chat.

After the lecture, we will stargaze in Boise State’s Observatory (at the Sci/Ed Building), weather permitting.