Speaker: Dr. Jordan Mirocha, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Date/Time: April 18, 2025 / 12 noon central.
Location: NCSA, 1040.
Zoom: https://illinois.zoom.us/j/82318062756?pwd=M3g1MFF6cytsOWFEbmU0UW1XWVoxQT09
Title: Mapping the near-infrared sky with SPHEREx
Abstract: SPHEREx, NASA's latest space telescope (just launched on March 11th!), will soon commence its survey of the entire sky in 102 near-infrared spectral channels from 0.75-5 microns. This rich dataset will be used for a wide variety of science, including studies of objects in our own solar system, an inventory of water and CO2 ice in the Milky Way, and constraints on cosmic inflation and the structure of the Universe on the largest scales. Due to its orbit and scan strategy, SPHEREx will also naturally build up deep fields in the ecliptic poles, which will enable unprecedented studies of the extragalactic background light (EBL). The EBL encodes the history of galaxy formation stretching from today all the way into the Epoch of Reionization, over 13 Gyr ago. In this talk, I will provide an overview of SPHEREx, including its three core science themes (ices, inflation, and EBL) and the kinds of public data products it will provide. I will close with a deep dive on the EBL, the status of our team's analysis pipeline, and what we hope to learn about galaxies near and far in the next few years.