May General Meeting

"Galaxies on the Edge! Using NASA's JWST to Learn How Galaxies Work."

presented by Prof. Chris Howk

Galaxies like the Milky Way form stars from their gas. However, maintaining enough gas at the right conditions to make new stars involves a delicate balance between the ingestion of new gas from a galaxy's extended atmosphere and the expulsion of gas full of life-giving elements from its disk. Notre Dame astronomers are working to understand this balance better using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Prof. Howk will discuss how JWST achieves its groundbreaking sensitivity and the results of his own work with this remarkable observatory.

About the Speaker:
Prof. Chris Howk is a professor in the University of Notre Dame's Department of Physics and Astronomy, where he teaches both astronomy and physics and mentors PhD students. Prof. Howk studied physics at Hanover College before getting his PhD in Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin. He worked previously to study the gas in the Milky Way and its nearest neighbors as part of NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer mission while at The Johns Hopkins University. He subsequently worked as a research physicist at the University of California, San Diego's Center for Astrophysics and Space Science, where he worked to study the gas of galaxies in the early Universe. Prof. Howk joined Notre Dame in 2005. Prof. Howk has been at Notre Dame long enough that his son is now a student there, and he's studying physics.

Note: You can also attend on Zoom. See our website for registration information.

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