Uncovering cosmic dawn: Searching for the first stars and galaxies

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Kasper Elm Heintz, Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen gives a lecture titled: Uncovering cosmic dawn: Searching for the first stars and galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope

Abstract:

Where do we all come from?

This is perhaps one the most fundamental questions we have asked ourselves through time as human beings, one that we are now one step closer to understand.

With advanced new technologies and instrumentation, in particular the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope, we can now start to see some of the first structures in the Universe and constrain when and how they formed.

In this talk, I will present some of the work I have carried out over the past few years to search for and characterize some of the earliest, most distant stars and galaxies with Webb. I will detail some of the scientific work (and political intrigues) that went into this major effort, and detail how we identified the most distant object to date, showing very peculiar features.

These new ground-breaking observations provide new, tight constraints on how the first stars and heavy elements (like oxygen, carbon, etc.) formed, key for life as we know it.