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February 2024 – Didcot Cafe Scientifique, Dr Chris Pearson, The Webb Space Telescope: A Cosmic Time Machine
20th February 2024 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Didcot Cafe Scientifique
Tuesday 20th February 2024 at 7.30pm
Taking place in Nourish Cafe at Cornerstone Arts Centre, Didcot
Dr Chris Pearson –The Webb Space Telescope: A Cosmic Time Machine
Webb is the successor to the Hubble space telescope. Launched on Christmas Day 2021, Webb is the largest and most powerful space science telescope ever constructed. It’s objective is to investigate the epoch when the very first stars and galaxies formed in our Universe, over 13.5 billion years ago. Webb has been enabling transformational science since its launch and this talk will highlight some of the most breath-taking and exciting discoveries to date. Webb is a joint collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and Canada with one of the major instruments, MIRI, built and tested in the UK, locally at RAL Space on the Harwell science campus.
Dr Chris Pearson is head of Astronomy at RAL Space on the Harwell campus. His PhD was in “Galaxy Evolution and Cosmology” with Prof. Michael Rowan-Robinson at Imperial College, London and has worked on large galaxy surveys for both ground based telescopes and space borne missions. He worked for 7 years in Japan on the AKARI space telescope before moving to the UK to RAL Space to work on the SPIRE instrument on the Herschel Space Observatory where he led the team that produced all the nice images from the mission. He now works on the ARIEL mission searching for exoplanets and the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, the largest scientific facility ever to be built.