Studying the faint galaxies in the epoch of reionisation combining JWST with the power of gravitational lensing

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• Rachana Bhatawdekar, European Space Research and Technology Centre
• Wednesday 01 June 2022, 14:00-15:00
• Physics West Lecture Theatre 117.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Nathan Steinle.

The epoch of reionisation (EoR) when the Universe transformed from a neutral state to an ionised state in an important phase change in the history of our Universe. But what were the first luminous sources responsible for this phase change and when exactly did they form? These are some of the major unanswered questions in extragalactic astronomy. The last twelve years since the installation of the Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have seen the frontier of galaxy evolution studies pushed well into the EoR and we are about to enter another period of revolution in this field with the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). In this talk, I will address the motivation behind studying the faint galaxies in the EoR, discuss how we have studied them with the current facilities before the launch of JWST and the subsequent results we have had in this area, particularly with the Hubble Frontier Fields program in which HST observed six massive clusters of galaxies as gravitational lenses to find the faintest and earliest galaxies in the Universe, ∼10-100 times fainter than any previously studied. Being a part of two Guaranteed Time Observations team and an Early Release Science program, I will further discuss the science that we will soon be doing with JWST , in particular by combining JWST with the power of gravitational lensing.

This talk is part of the Astrophysics Seminars series.

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• Astrophysics Seminars
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