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“Exciting Results with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope”

     Professor Alexei V. Filippenko, Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, Class of 1954 Chair, University of California, Berkeley, offers a lecture lasting about one hour, richly illustrated with images obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope. JWST, the largest space telescope, with a mirror 21 feet wide, detects infrared (heat) radiation, providing information not available to the Hubble Space Telescope. Viewing infrared light provides information not available at other wavelengths. It also allows astronomers to study the most distant galaxies in the Universe, the formation of new stars inside dense clouds of gas and dust, newly formed dust in the gases ejected by exploding stars, and very cool objects such as brown dwarfs. Moreover, it provides a method for determining at least part of the atmospheric composition of planets orbiting other stars. Among JWST’s most surprising results so far is the very early formation of galaxies after the Big Bang, but there have also been many other fascinating discoveries from this amazing telescope!

     Speaker's Bio: Alex Filippenko, an elected member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, is one of the world’s most highly cited astrophysicists. His scientific accomplishments,  documented in more than 1200 research papers, have been recognized with numerous prizes. He was the only person to have been a member of both teams that revealed the accelerating expansion of the Universe, a discovery that was honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to the teams’ leaders. He is a frequent user of the Hubble Space Telescope and JWST, winner of the highest teaching awards at UC Berkeley, and has been voted the “Best Professor” on campus a record 9 times; in 2006, he was named the Case/Carnegie National Professor of the Year among doctoral institutions. Most recently, he was honored with the 2026 Klumpke-Roberts Award for outstanding contributions to the public understanding and appreciation of astronomy. He has produced 5 video courses with The Great Courses, co-authored an award-winning astronomy textbook, and appears in more than 120 television documentaries.