Kaufmanis Lecture

Title: The JWST Revolution in Galaxy Formation 

Abstract: Understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies remains one of the great challenges of modern cosmology. Key outstanding questions include: Why do stars start and stop forming in galaxies? Galaxies are not island universes, so how do they participate in their larger cosmic environments? How does the breathtaking variety in galactic structures (spiral disks, spheroids, irregulars) originate? What is the ongoing relationship between galaxies and the supermassive black holes that live at their centers? And, of course, what is the nature of the very first galaxies in the early universe? Recently, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revolutionized our ability to answer these questions with direct measurements of galaxies observed as they existed over 13 billion years ago. In particular, we have gained unprecedented insights into galaxies in the very early universe by analyzing not only their images but also their spectra. These breathtaking new data provide essential clues about the origin of many key chemical elements such as oxygen and nitrogen, which, in turn, reveal the workings of the galaxy formation process itself. 

Bio: Alice Shapley is a full professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She obtained her AB at Harvard University in 1997, and a PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 2003. She was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University, before joining the faculty at UCLA in 2008. Shapley uses both large ground-based telescopes (e.g., the Keck Observatory in Hawaii) and space-based facilities (e.g., the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope) to collect optical and infrared images and spectra of distant galaxies, in order to address key questions in galaxy formation and evolution. She has been awarded honors for her research including Sloan and Packard Fellowships, and was recently elected a fellow of the American Physical Society.