Place: HF Deluca Forum, Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery
Speaker: Jonathan Gardner, NASA
Abstract: Astronomers try to answer the biggest question of all: “How did we get here?” Using a flood of data from the Hubble Space Telescope, other space missions, large telescopes on the ground and super-computer simulations, we are starting to piece together the history of how simple particles, mass and energy that formed in the Big Bang changed over time to become galaxies, stars and planets today. In this talk, I will discuss some of the most important astronomical discoveries of the last 20 years, and the role that space telescopes have played in those discoveries. The next decade looks equally bright with Hubble and the promise of its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. I will describe Hubble’s greatest accomplishments and how they lead to the reasons we are building Webb.