This Star Party will be online only. Watch us on Youtube!

CASTOR: A Flagship Canadian Space Telescope

w/ Tyrone Woods

abstract

Here in Victoria and across the country, Canadian scientists are leading efforts to unravel some of the deepest mysteries of the Universe, from uncovering the birth of the first black holes to hunting for Earth-like planets in our cosmic backyard. Much of this work relies on powerful space telescopes, like the Hubble and the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope. With the Hubble Space Telescope likely nearing the end of its operations, however, there is an urgent need for a new space telescope that can observe in the optical (light that we humans can see) and in the ultraviolet.

In this talk, I'll highlight the ongoing effort, led here at DAO, to build the Cosmological Advanced Survey Telescope for Optical and UV Research (CASTOR), a flagship Canadian Space Telescope. CASTOR will have the extraordinary resolution of Hubble but will be able to look at an area of the sky 100 times larger in a single picture, providing humanity's foremost eye on the sky in the ultraviolet.

bio

Dr. Tyrone Woods is a Plaskett Fellow at NRC Herzberg in Victoria, BC. There, he studies the physics of some of the most energetic events and objects in the Universe, by combining theoretical models with observations across the electromagnetic spectrum. He is also a Science Co-lead for the CASTOR mission, a proposed flagship Canadian space telescope. Before returning to Canada, he completed his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich, Germany, and held research fellowships in Australia and the UK.