Beyond HST: from exoplanets to first stars with the James Webb Space Telescope

by Rogier A. Windhorst (JWST Interdisciplinary Scientist School of Earth & Space Exploration - Arizona State University)

Tuesday 11 Mar 2014, 16:00 → 18:00 Europe/Rome

Aula Conversi (Dip. di Fisica - Edificio G. Marconi)

In the last 20 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionized our knowledge of the Universe, providing us with an unprecedented view of all classes of objects in the sky, from local stars to the most distant galaxies. Despite this, many fundamental questions remain un-addressed. How and when were the first stars made? What are the sources that re-ionized the Universe? What is the interplay between massive Black Holes and stellar populations and how did affect the formation of massive galaxies? How are stars formed in the local Universe? Can we detect and characterize planets around stars nearby our Sun? These and fundamental question cannot be addressed by HST, whose instruments are aging and cannot be refurbished because of the end of the Shuttle program. The time is ripe for its successor: the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). With its mirror of 6.5m in diameter - nearly 3 times the HST - and its unique instrumentation JWST is the most ambitious and complex telescope ever designed and build. It is scheduled for launch in 2018 and will operate from the L2 orbit, beyond every possible intervention from human crews. In my talk I will first briefly review the main features of the project and its path from today till launch, now planned for Fall 2018. I will hence focus on the major scientific discoveries that are expected from JWST. They range from the discover and characterization of Earth-like exoplanets around stars in our Galaxy to the discovery and study of the first stars and galaxies that shone in the primordial Universe. I will show that the depth of the JWST observations will be so extreme that even small effects (like gravitational lensing from galaxies on the line of sight) need to be understood and quantified. I will also describe how the impressive improvement in the depth and quality of the data will require a new generation of algorithms to automatically detect, measure and classify objects in  ultradeep JWST fields.