Steven Finkelstein

Steven Finkelstein is a Professor and the Director of the Cosmic Frontier Center in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a BS from the University of Washington, and a PhD in Physics from Arizona State University; he has been faculty at UT Austin since 2012. His research focuses on the discovery and characterization of the most distant galaxies in the universe, with an emphasis on studying their evolution from that distant epoch to today. He is the Principal Investigator of two major early JWST programs.

The Abundance of UV-Luminous Galaxies, Massive Galaxies, and Supermassive Black Holes at Early Times

The first data from JWST surprised us all with the revealed high abundance of UV-luminous galaxies, massive galaxies, and super-massive black holes. Now that the early days of discovery are behind us, we can begin to better assess which results stand the test of time, and for those, what physical processes can explain them. I will present recent results from the CEERS, PRIMER and NGDEEP surveys, exploring our current best-possible constraints on the abundance of UV luminous galaxies, whether any early galaxies are “too massive”, and what constraints we can place on the growth of early supermassive black holes.