Robert A. Simcoe – Director, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
Science in the Early Universe with the James Webb Space Telescope
THE CLASSROOM WILL BE CLOSED FOR THIS EVENT
This lecture will be hosted as a Webinar on Zoom as well as a live stream on our YouTube channel. We encourage you to participate, ask questions, and be a part of the live meeting.
WAS welcomes Robert A. Simcoe of the Francis L. Friedman Professor of Physics, The Director of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research to the Westport Astronomical Society’s Online Science Lecture Series in April. Dr. Simcoe studies the formation of the earliest stars and galaxies by constructing custom-built spectrometers for major astronomical observatories.
After decades of design and construction, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Christmas Day 2021, and released for observation in July 2022. My team has been involved in some of the earliest observations with this new observatory, whose performance has exceeded all expectations. I will describe our approach to using JWST to observe nascent galaxies and their production of the first heavy elements less than one billion years after the Big Bang. Along the way, I will share some idiosyncrasies of the telescope as well as the people who built it. I will also describe new projects on the horizon to build the next generation of super-sized ground-based telescopes that will work in tandem with JWST, peering further back into time and also studying the atmospheric composition of extrasolar planets.
Rob Simcoe is a native of Westborough, Massachusetts, where he first acquired an interest in astronomy and telescope-making as a family hobby through trips to the Stellafane convention. As an undergraduate, he participated in the development of the photometric camera for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, after which he moved to Caltech for graduate school. While there, he collaborated with Mark Metzger on the construction of a prime focus camera for the 200″ Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory, and completed a thesis on chemical enrichment of the intergalactic medium with Wal Sargent, using the Keck Telescopes. In 2003 he moved to MIT as a Pappalardo Postdoctoral Fellow, to make use of the newly commissioned 6.5-meter Magellan Telescopes, and joined the MIT faculty in 2006. Three years later he installed the FIRE infrared spectrometer at Magellan, which has played a key role in the exploration of cool stars in the nearby universe, and the discovery and characterization of high redshift quasars and measurements of intergalactic matter in the first billion years after the Big Bang. His research group is now focused on the construction of a new hyperspectral imager for Magellan named LLAMAS, as well as the first dedicated telescope using InGaAs detectors for astronomical surveys of the transient infrared sky, and preparations for scheduled observations with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. In 2019 Simcoe was appointed Director of the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.