The First Two Billion Years:
What the Hubble Space Telescope Tells Us About the Early Universe

Professor Steve Beckwith
Vice-President for Research at the University of California System

Recently, the Hubble Space Telescope unveiled the deepest image ever taken of the visible Universe. The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) reveals the first galaxies to emerge from the so-called “dark ages”, the time shortly after the Big Bang when the   first stars reheated the cold, dark Universe. This offers new insights into the objects which reheated the Universe.

In this talk, given by the P.I. of the HUDF, a summary of this project will be presented. The HUDF observations will then be used to search for the most distant and youngest galaxies in the Universe, existed between 400 and 800 million years after the Big Bang. A key question  addressed in this talk in whether the Universe appears to be the same at this very early time as it did when the cosmos was between 1 and 2 billion years old. It will be shown that galaxies evolved so quickly in the Universe that their most important changes happened within a billion years of the Big Bang. This will be the earliest in the history of the observable Universe we would be able to explore for a long time and before the next generation of the Space Telescopes are launched.

Date:  Thursday, April 17, 2008
Engineering Bldg, Unit 2, Room 138
Time: 3:45 PM
Coffee served in Barkas Lounge @ 3:10 PM