Denis Burgarella (LAM)

We can read in the science case presented for several next generation telescope projects, sentences like « The First Light theme science goal is to find and understand these predicted first light objects ». This one was extracted from https://jwst.stsci.edu/science-planning/science-corner/the-end-of-the-dark-ages-first-l Using what we presently know about galaxies in the very high redshift universe to z ~ 10, we can start to predict what we can expect in the redshift range 10 < z < 15 and these first-light objects. In this talk, I will try to present the present status of these predictions from several recent papers. As one might expect, the density of these extreme redshift galaxies and their spectral characteristics make them difficult to detect. I will derive some constraints about what the characteristics of a telescope should be to detect a reasonable sample of galaxies at z > 10 to z ~ 15. In addition to the extreme universe study, FLARE will build a 5000 deg2 imaging survey and 40 deg2 spectrocopic survey of the Milky Way in the N/M-IR at sub-arcsec resolution. In conclusion, we propose a technically simple and realistic project with clear and unique objectives related to the extreme universe and to the local universe communities (applications for the Solar system also exist). No other project in operation or planned is able to address these questions in the same statistical way.