Table of Contents:
- Fred Kavli Plenary Lecture: Unveiling the First 500 Myr of the Universe with CEERS, Steven Finkelstein (University of Texas, Austin)
- Helen B. Warner Prize Lecture: Magnetism and Morphology: Decoding the Interstellar Medium, Susan Clark (Stanford University)
- George Ellery Hale Prize Lecture: Why are the Coronae of the Sun and Other Stars so Darned Hot?, James Klimchuk (NASA GSFC)
- Plenary Lecture: Supernovae: The Ultimate Laboratories of Extreme Astrophysics, Danny “Dan” Milisavljevic (Purdue University)
Fred Kavli Plenary Lecture: Unveiling the First 500 Myr of the Universe with CEERS, Steven Finkelstein (University of Texas, Austin) (by Olivia Cooper)
Kicking off Day 1 of AAS 246, Professor Steve Finkelstein (UT Austin) gave his prize plenary titled “Unveiling the First 500 Myr of the Universe with CEERS.” In it, he shared the stories and surprises of CEERS (Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey), one of the earliest programs with JWST, comprised of an international team of extragalactic astronomers led by Prof. Finkelstein. Though he admittedly “suffered from a lack of imagination” at first and supposed the survey would merely confirm past assumptions about galaxy evolution, instead CEERS has uncovered new mysteries about galaxies in the very early Universe.
Prof. Finkelstein’s main scientific goal is to find out when the lights first turned on, or when galaxies formed out of the cosmic dark ages. To understand this beginning of everything, Finkelstein and his team work to observe galaxies at earlier and earlier times, count them up, and investigate what they look like. With the longer wavelength coverage and sensitivity of JWST, we can push this galaxy counting technique to even earlier times, within the first few 100 million years (of about 14 billion years from the Big Bang to now). Even in the first few days after receiving the first data from CEERS (see Figure 1), the team found a few surprises, all of which have since held up: the early Universe is full of (1) too many unexpectedly bright galaxies, (2) galaxies that are too massive, and (3) lots of accreting supermassive black holes. With more detailed data coming in from spectroscopic follow-up programs, the team is now working towards confirming these galaxy puzzles, and eventually determining the physical origins of the seemingly rapidly evolving early Universe.
Throughout his talk, Finkelstein shared his appreciation for the CEERS team and continually promoted the work of junior scientists (including Katherine Chworowsky, Rebecca Larson, Mic Bagley, Alexa Morales, Pablo Arrabal Haro, and more). He emphasized that it is an explicit goal of CEERS to enable tons of science within the broader astronomy community, and pointed us to the CEERS survey paper and website, where you can download data products and find detailed jupyter notebooks to reduce JWST data. Lastly, Finkelstein reminded us that to support our community in light of the ongoing threat to science in the US, it is essential to be vigilant in our resistance…