Cosmic Close-Up

Credit: Adriana Manrique Gutierrez/NASA GSFC/CIL.

Move over Hubble. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the new kid on the cosmic block and 100 times more powerful. UT Austin faculty and postdoctoral researchers are leading some of the first projects on JWST: COSMOS-Web, which astronomer Caitlin Casey is co-leading, is the largest project in JWST’s first year, and the NGDEEP Survey, co-led by her colleague Steven Finkelstein, is among the largest.

Cosmic Dawn

How did the earliest galaxies form?
How did they transform the universe from opaque to clear? Casey’s & Finkelstein’s projects will study a period soon after the Big Bang known as the Cosmic Dawn using, as Casey puts it, “the most powerful view that we have as humans of the most distant, faint objects in the cosmos.”

A Star is Born

Will Best, a postdoctoral researcher, is leading a project to study low-mass stars and companions of stars that fail to ignite, called brown dwarfs. By determining their mass distributions, Best hopes to clarify the physics of star formation.

Spin Cycle

Giant planets start out as solid cores that snag most of their mass from a swirling disk of gas encircling them like a hula hoop. Brendan Bowler leads a project studying these disks to better understand how giant planets and their moons form. Discoveries could offer lessons about exoplanet habitability.