Description:

The last two years of JWST have revealed many surprises in the first billion years of the universe: overly bright and/or massive and/or old galaxies, luminous and numerous black holes, and a range of complex photoionization conditions. The surprising new populations in the early universe and the (potential) for new emergent physics create both challenges and opportunities for modeling and learning from these exciting data. I will provide an overview of some of the modeling efforts ongoing in the latest JWST surveys of the early Universe, highlighting the known and unknown physics of these early systems, and the exciting new data-intensive methods developed to extract useful information from the available data. I will focus particularly on the putative early assembly of massive galaxies and key outstanding uncertainties in this story.

Speaker: Joel Leja, Penn State

Host: Wen-fair Fong