Lycoming College to host astrophysicist for annual lecture series
Williamsport, Pa. — Lycoming College invites the public to a lecture on the "cosmic frontier" and the revolutionary information being transmitted by the James Webb telescope.
The James and Emily Douthat lecture series will host Dr. Jeyhan Kartaltepe, associate professor of astrophysical sciences and technology at Rochester Institute of Technology, for a talk entitled "Exploring the Cosmic Frontier with James Webb Space Telescope."
The talk, slated for Thursday, Oct. 24, 7:30 p.m., will take place in the Trogner Presentation Room in the Krapf Gateway Center. The event is free and open to the public.
"The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched in December 2021, first started collecting data in June 2022 and has already revolutionized our understanding of the distant Universe. With its large, segmented mirror, and optimization for infrared wavelengths, JWST was designed to detect and characterize some of the first galaxies to form in our universe and investigate how galaxies then evolve over the age of the Universe to the present day," said Kartaltepe.
"In this talk, I will present how JWST has pushed our cosmic frontier beyond what was possible with Hubble and share some early results from extragalactic deep surveys and their implications for our understanding of the early universe."
Kartaltepe is an astrophysicist in the School of Physics and Astronomy. She is an expert in the areas of galaxy formation and evolution, galaxy morphologies, galaxy mergers and interactions, and the properties of infrared galaxies. She is a co-PI of the large collaboration COSMOS (The Cosmic Evolution Survey), which is a large area multiwavelength extragalactic survey, utilizing nearly every major ground- and space-based telescope, a PI of the COSMOS-Web Cycle 1 JWST program (the largest GO program), and a leading co-I for CEERS (The Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey).
Kartaltepe teaches courses across the undergraduate and graduate astrophysics curriculum and mentors undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdocs in a wide range of research projects.
The lecture is sponsored by the James and Emily Douthat Distinguished Lectureship Series in the liberal arts and sciences, named for James Douthat, former president of Lycoming College, and his wife Emily, for their years of service to the College. The annual lecture, which is not field-specific, attracts top scholarly guest speakers to the College and has featured Nobel prize and Pulitzer prize winners. Lycoming's chapter of Phi Kappa Phi, a national honor society for all academic disciplines, organizes the lectureship.
