Our April 13th meeting at 7pm in the Student Union, Cochise College Sierra Vista features a talk by Dr. Kevin Hainline.
Dr. Hainline is an astronomer and researcher on the James Webb Space Telescope NIRCam science team at Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on hunting for active galaxies and quasars and understanding the effects of a growing, powerful supermassive black hole on its host galaxy. Currently, he is helping to plan the initial deep observations to be done by JWST to explore the evolution of the earliest galaxies. He received his PhD from UCLA in 2012 and spent three years as a researcher and professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, before moving to Tucson to work on JWST. Kevin has a passion for science outreach education, speaking about astronomy any chance he can get. Kevin is very enthusiastic.
The Extraordinary James Webb Space Telescope and the Future of Astronomy
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), NASA’s next generation space observatory, is set to launch in 2019 on a mission to explore the distant universe, nearby exoplanets, and young stars nestled in their cocoons of dust and gas. Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which was the size of a school bus, the full extent of JWST is around the size of a tennis court, complete with a segmented, gold-plated, 6.5 meter (21 feet) primary mirror. In this talk, Dr. Kevin Hainline, a member of the JWST NIRCam science team at the University of Arizona, will describe some of the revolutionary astronomy and cosmology research that this telescope will enable, focusing on the work being done here in Tucson.