JWST First Images – International Space Centre crunching the numbers

In the only NASA-accredited Australian public program to celebrate the first images to come off Webb’s telescope, the International Space Agency – as a mission partner – spent an evening exploring exclusive imagery with Professor Simon Driver, Dr Elizabete Da Cunha and Dr Sabine Bellstadt. Professor Simon Driver has been involved with Webb since 1996, and obtained 110 of the very first coveted hours booked on Webb.

Professor Driver’s team will be crunching the numbers for the 48 hours prior to our event following the initial release, to bring insight into the first – and farthest – looks back in time humans have ever been able to see.

We speak with Dr Robin Cook, Research Associate who is working closely with the The MeerKAT International GHz Tiered Extragalactic Exploration (MIGHTEE) Survey to bridge the gap between the unprecedented depth of cold gas observations in galaxies with the richness of environmental metrics providing by the Deep Extragalactic VIsible Legacy Survey (DEVILS; led from ICRAR/UWA by Dr Luke Davies). DEVILS is building a state-of-the-art spectroscopic sample of ~50,000 galaxies (the largest of its kind) spanning the last ~8 billion years of galaxy evolution. The DEVILS campaign bridges the currently dissociated near and distant Universe, making it the only survey suited to explore the impact of mergers across cosmic timescales.

Official NASA JWST images website: https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

For more on ICRAR visit https://www.icrar.org

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