Breaking the Universe: Discoveries from the Beginning of Time
MARCH 22, 2024
Dr. Caitlin Casey
What is the talk about?
The powerful James Webb Space Telescope allows us to see back to the beginning of time, shortly after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies were only starting to form. Professor Caitlin Casey will explore with us some exciting new discoveries made using JWST during the first billion years of cosmic time. These discoveries are challenging scientists’ existing understanding about the universe itself and will change the way you see the cosmos.
Image of the Ring Nebula, based on research by a team including Prof. Dinerstein and Dr. Kaplan of UT Astronomy. Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Barlow (UCL), N. Cox (ACRI-ST), R. Wesson (Cardiff University).
About our presenter
Dr. Caitlin Casey
Caitlin Casey is observational astronomer and Associate Professor of Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. She has expertise in the most massive galaxies formed through cosmic time and uses an array of telescopes around the world and in space to answer fundamental questions about the growth of the first galaxies. She leads the largest public program on the James Webb Space Telescope called COSMOS-Web, a deep field about 200 times larger than the original Hubble Deep Field. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge and spent five years as a postdoctoral researcher in Hawaii and California before joining the faculty at UT in 2015.