The Coastal Carolina University Gupta College of Science will host a NASA James Webb Space Telescope event featuring a presentation by Joleen Carlberg, Ph.D., of the Space Telescope Science Institute, on Thursday, Nov. 11 at 7 p.m. in Wheelwright Auditorium. Her presentation, Looking Deep into the Universe, is free and open to the public, and will also be livestreamed. Tickets are required for the in-person presentation and may be reserved online or obtained at the Wheelwright box office on the night of the event. Weather permitting, an astronomical observing session will immediately follow the event.

Carlberg will present an overview of the Webb Space Telescope’s design and capabilities, and discuss some of the exciting things that are expected to be discovered with this new instrument.

According to Wes Hitt, Ph.D., associate professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Engineering Science at CCU, the Webb Space Telescope is the next generation of space-based observatories and will feature capabilities that are much greater than the Hubble Space Telescope.

Ian Hewitt, a teaching associate in the Department of Physics and Engineering Science, and the emcee of the event, said, “The Webb Space Telescope is an engineering feat, as it will operate far from Earth in a much colder, more remote part of space, compared to the Hubble. For that reason, its performance is the result of many new innovations, innovations that are also spinning off new technologies that benefit life right here on Earth.”

Carlberg joined the institute in 2016 as a support scientist on the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph team. She previously was a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and a Vera Rubin Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. She is interested in the red giant phase of stellar evolution and its consequences on exoplanetary systems. Much of her observational work focuses on studying red giants with unusual properties, in search of evidence of the tidal engulfment of planets by their host stars.

Carlberg earned a bachelor’s degree in astronomy and astrophysics from Villanova University, and both a master and Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Virginia.