On November 15, 2025 at 7:30 PM our free public night features University of Iowa grad student Philip Griffin. Griffin discusses past and future space telescopes. After the presentation, weather permitting, CAA volunteers will be operating several of our large research-grade telescopes.
One of the primary science drivers of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) mission is to uncover information about galaxy formation in the early Universe using infrared light. While JWST is the most powerful telescope we have ever sent into orbit, and has already revolutionized our understanding of the Universe, it is unable to view most structures within these ancient galaxies. By complimenting JWST observations of early galaxies with studies of small, isolated, nearby galaxies in radio and visible light with ground-based observatories, we aim to learn more about the how galaxies may have formed and evolved in the early Universe through today.
NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is an upcoming flagship observatory planned to make use of infrared, optical, and ultraviolet light with the goal of studying nearby exoplanets around Sun-like stars to determine their habitability. The HWO mission requires spectrographs, instruments designed to split light into component colors, with well-understood, high quality diffraction gratings enabling detection of gases within exoplanet atmospheres implying their habitability. A variety of instruments will be used to characterize these gratings to better understand their performance and allow astronomers to detect these weak signals. In this talk, Griffin will present what he has been working on as a graduate student at the University of Iowa over the last three years and how that work relates to these intriguing science questions.
This event is free in person and also available on Zoom. Go to cedar-astronomers.org/events for more information.
