On Wednesday 22 February at 7pm, Thetford Public Libraries Network presents René Doyon’s conference titled ‘The first results of the James Webb Space Telescope’.
After more than two decades in development, the James Webb Space Telescope was finally launched on Christmas Day 2021 on a near-perfect trajectory to its final destination at the second Lagrange point, 1.5 million km from Earth. Its complex operation was impeccable, as was the six-month commissioning period that ensued to characterize the performance of the telescope and its four instruments, one of which was made in Canada. Webb works as expected or even better. Its first spectroscopic demonstration images and data are spectacular and went around the world this summer. The speaker gives a brief overview of the Webb mission with some results on distant galaxies and the atmospheric characterization of exoplanets.
A few words about the speaker
Originally from Thetford Mines, René Doyon embarked on an impressive and respected career as an astrophysicist at the end of his studies in the early 1990s. He started out as a researcher and is now a full professor in the Faculty of Physics at the Université de Montréal.
Recognized as a leader in the study of extrasolar planets, his research has led to important discoveries that have earned him numerous awards. Among these, note that twice, in 2008 and 2023, he received the Scientist of the Year award presented by Radio-Canada.
He is Director of the Mont Mégantic Observatory and Institute for Exoplanet Research and one of the four principal researchers involved in the construction of the James Webb Space Telescope, a $10 billion complex observatory being developed by NASA with support from the became the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. He also directs various avant-garde astronomical instrumentation projects (camera and spectrograph) for the Mont Mégantic Observatory and other observatories in Hawaii and Chile.
Thetford Public Library Network users can purchase tickets at the circulation desk of the Cégep library. Note that a limit of two tickets per member has been set.