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The First Stars and Galaxies: Challenges for the Next Decade Participants
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Talk
Title: How will the James Webb Space Telescope measure First Light, Reionization, and Galaxy Assembly in the post WMAP-7 and WFC3 era? Author(s): Rogier Windhorst Abstract: We review how the 6.5 meter James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can measure First Light, Reionization, Galaxy Assembly, building on lessons learned from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in the WMAP-year7 era. We show what combination of area, depth, and wavelength coverage are needed for JWST to detect a sufficient number of First Light objects, and to measure their evolving luminosity function (LF). In detail, JWST will map the epoch of First light through Pop III star dominated objects at redshifts z=8--20, and its transition to the first Pop II stars in dwarf galaxies at z<9. JWST will measure the evolution of the steep faint-end of the dwarf galaxy LF at z=6--12, which likely provided the UV-flux needed to start and finish Hydrogen reionization. We will discuss: 1) what deep JWST images will look like compared to the Hubble UltraDeep Field (HUDF), given JWST's expected PSF performance; (2) simulations of what nearby galaxies observed in the restframe UV--optical by HST would look like to JWST at very high redshifts; (3) quantitative methods to determine structural parameters of faint galaxies in deep JWST images as a function of cosmic epoch to delineate the progress of galaxy assembly; (4) to what extent JWST's short-wavelength performance --- which needed to be relaxed in the 2005 redefinition of the telescope --- will affect JWST's ability to accurately determine faint galaxy parameters; and (5) if ultradeep JWST images will run into the instrumental and natural confusion limits. A new generation of algorithms may be needed to automatically detect, measure and classify objects in very crowded, ultradeep JWST fields.
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