Astronomy Colloquium

The capabilities of the 6.5 meter James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) --- slated for launch to a halo L2 orbit in 2013 --- are reviewed, including the considerations to make this an optimized infrared telescope that can deploy automatically in space. The main science themes of this telescope are to measure First Light, Reionization, Galaxy Assembly, as well as the process of Star-formation and the origin of Planetary Systems. The talk will outline how the JWST will go about measuring First Light, Reionization, and Galaxy Assembly, building on lessons learned from the Hubble Space Telescope. In detail, JWST will map the epoch of First light through Pop III star clusters at redshifts z=8--20, and its transition to the first Pop II stars in dwarf galaxies that likely finished cosmic reionization at redshifts z=6-7. I will show what deep JWST images may look like compared to the Hubble UltraDeep Field, and what nearby galaxies observed in their restframe UV--optical light would look like to JWST at very high redshifts. I'll demonstrate an interactive web-tool that lets the user zoom 3-D into the Hubble UltraDeep Field --- and beyond into the epoch of First Light --- with all galaxy
images sorted versus redshift. Time permitting, I will discuss issues of the natural confusion limit as they may apply to JWST, and algorithms that may be needed to automatically detect objects in crowded ultradeep JWST fields.