Title: The James Webb Space Telescope, and How It Is Already Challenging Our Theories of Galaxy Formation and Cosmology

Abstract: The James Webb Space Telescope is the culmination of thirty years of planning, twenty years of construction, and eleven billion dollars of funding, and for the past two months it has been dazzling astronomers and the public alike with spectacular early-release science images. I will provide an overview of the capabilities of this flagship telescope, including STScI commissioning data describing its performance and projected lifetime. I will then pivot to discussing some of the stunning early, and sometimes tentative, discoveries in the field of galaxy formation. Emerging from the small sliver of publicly-available Cycle 1 data alone, there is already a growing consensus that massive galaxies are forming "impossibly early" in the Universe, so much so that it is suggesting tension with LCDM at the ~3 sigma level. Tantalizingly, these conclusions remain sensitive to the in-flux absolute flux calibration of JWST. These headline conclusions are paired with a raft of other exciting discoveries, such as puzzling "HST-dark" galaxy populations newly unveiled by JWST, multiple new distance records based on photometric redshift analysis, and surprising one-off discoveries, such as full populations of globular clusters at z~1. I will end with a discussion of some of the exciting upcoming deep-universe Webb surveys which we will begin analyzing here at Penn State over the next few months.

Astro Colloquium and 'coffee & cookies' department gathering (3:45-4:00pm)

Please click the link to join virtually: https://psu.zoom.us/j/92637070419