JWST’s Distant Universe as Seen by CANUCS

The fantastic spatial resolution and light-gathering power of JWST, when further boosted by gravitational lensing, gives an amazing way to study distant galaxies to hitherto unreachable depths and in unprecedented spatial detail.

            The Canadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS) is the largest JWST Cycle-1 program to target gravitationally-lensing clusters. It is one of the two large Guaranteed Time Observations (GTO) programs by the NIRISS Instrument Science Team designed to showcase the power of JWST’s NIRISS instrument 

            CANUCS targets the fields of 5 gravitationally-lensing clusters with a massive 200 hours of JWST/NIRCam imaging, NIRISS slitless grism spectroscopy, and NIRSpec MOS observations. The program is designed to tackle two of JWST’s four key science areas:  the origin of galaxies and their subsequent growth over cosmic time. This talk will give an overview of the CANUCS project and highlight some of what we have already learned from CANUCS observations about distant galaxies from z~1 to the Epoch of Reionization.