Photo by BJ Fulton (courtesy of The Guardian)
Sam Miller
On Sunday evening, Jan. 12, 2025, the SaddleBrooke SkyGazers Astronomy Club will present Christa DeCoursey, a fourth-year PhD student at the University of Arizona and a member of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) team. The Program presentation will be at the DesertView Theater, 39900 S. Clubhouse Drive, at 7 p.m. Christa’s presentation will focus on the most distant exploding stars (“supernovae”) discovered thus far with JWST.
JADES is a collaboration between the Guaranteed Time Observation teams of the NIRCam and NIRSpec instruments. The goal of JADES is to reveal the physical properties of galaxies in the young Universe, from when it was less than two billion years old up to the formation of the first galaxies right after the Cosmic “Dark Ages.” Being a member of JADES allowed Christa to branch out into the study of astronomical “transients,” which are objects in the sky that change their brightness on human timescales (i.e., months-years). There are many different types of transients, but she has specifically researched supernovae, which are exploding stars. JWST can see fainter and more distant objects than other telescopes, which has allowed Christa and her team to discover the most distant supernovae thus far. The team has built a large sample of distant supernovae and are currently researching their properties that tell us more about how and when they exploded.
Christa received her Bachelor of Science degree in both physics and astrophysics from the University of Florida in 2021. Since then, she has worked as a member of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey team while at U of A, with Dr. Eiichi Egami as her supervisor. She is now focusing her work on astronomical transients and recently discovered the two most distant supernovae ever found.
The SaddleBrooke SkyGazers Astronomy Club meets monthly (and typically) on the second Sunday evening at 7 p.m. at the DesertView Theater. The winter Star Parties are scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 15; Thursday, Feb. 20; and Tuesday, March 4, at the softball field parking lot. The public is welcome to both meetings and Star Parties. Club and Star Party information can be obtained by emailing Sam Miller at [email protected].