The James Webb Space Telescope is actually a time machine!
Dr. L. Y. Aaron Yung, postdoctoral fellow in the Observational Cosmology Lab at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Seeing Farther into the Universe:

A look at the James Webb Space Telescope


Sunday, November 14, 2021
2:00pm - 5:00pm EST
Arlington Mill Community Center Room 527
Free in-person event with live streaming from 2:30 – 4:30

As part of a day of discovery about the James Webb Space Telescope, Dr. L. Y. Aaron Yung, a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at the Observational Cosmology Lab at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, will present the featured talk, "The James Webb Space Telescope is actually a time machine!"

The long-anticipated James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), NASA's next generation flagship observatory, is set to be launched on December 18, 2021. Given its unprecedented sensitivity, JWST is expected to routinely find faint galaxies that are up to billions of light-years away. The galaxy light that traversed across the universe to reach us is encoded with messages about their sources as they were emitted billions of years ago. And by decoding messages from large populations of galaxies at various distances, we will be able to reconstruct our Universe's past history, as well as how galaxies formed and evolved over time. Aaron will be giving an overview on JWST's mission timeline and briefly highlight a handful of most anticipated survey programs. He will also go over some of the science we hope to learn from these observations and showcase some of the predictions he made.

Aaron Yung's work primarily focuses on modelling galaxy formation in the early episodes of the Universe's history and creating predictions that guide observing strategies for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope and other flagship observatories. Prior to joining NASA, Aaron received his PhD from Rutgers University and was a visiting researcher at the Center for Computational Astrophysics of the Flatiron Institute. Aaron's dissertation research has been published in a series of works entitled “Semi-analytic forecasts for JWST”, in which he studied the co-evolution of galaxy formation and cosmic reionization using semi-analytic methods.

For more information about the overall event, please click here for the full description.