Speaking: 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.
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. She has now focused her work on astronomical transients and recently discovered the two most distant supernovae ever found.
