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Dark Energy

Quest for the Most Distant Universe – Today and Beyond

Event Type
Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor
Department of Astronomy
Location
134 Astronomy Building
Virtual
wifi event
Date
Apr 29, 2025   3:45 - 4:45 pm  
Speaker
Professor Seiji Fujimoto
Contact
Daniel Franco
E-Mail
danielf9@illinois.edu
Phone
217-300-6769
Originating Calendar
Astronomy Colloquium Speaker Calendar

Finding and characterizing the earliest systems are crucial for answering fundamental cosmological questions such as the emergence of first galaxies and black holes (BHs), as well as the cosmic reionization process. The advent of JWST has advanced our capability to detect and analyze systems from the early galaxies, now serving the candidates out to z~20. Simultaneously, submm/mm observations have gained prominence, providing complementary insights into the cold dust and gas characteristics and verifying the authenticity of ultra-high-redshift galaxy candidates against dusty lower-redshift interlopers. In this talk, I will overview my recent quest for the most distant universe. My strategy synergizes JWST, ALMA, and Gravitational Lensing for the most sensitive and comprehensive investigations of the earliest epochs. My systematic JWST spectroscopic survey corroborates the high abundance of z > 9 galaxies recently claimed from photometric measurements, and I will discuss its possible origins from their initial characterizations. I also derive the infrared luminosity function by establishing the largest faint ALMA mm sample ever, enabling the first direct attempt to quantify the total (=unobscured + dust-obscured) cosmic star formation history up to z~8. Our JWST and ALMA joint deep follow-up observations for a strongly lensed early galaxy resolve a single disk-like structure into at least 15 individual young massive star clusters with effective radii of 10-50pc, which dominate 70% of the galaxy's total flux and are embedded in a smooth rotating disk (V/σ~3). This indicates that the feedback effect is significantly weak, providing a plausible physical explanation for the enhanced star-forming activities in the early universe, unveiled by our recent rest-UV and FIR studies above. At the end of my talk, I will also introduce my ~300hrs Cycle4+5 treasury program of Vast Exploration for Nascent, Unexplored Sources (VENUS), the JWST's first wide lensing cluster survey. 

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