The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) started observations two years ago in July 2022. JWST has stunned astronomers with its discoveries and its gorgeous images. We’ve seen one of the first galaxies to turn on, only 290 million years after the Big Bang. We’ve seen a supermassive black hole, already billions of times the mass of the Sun, just 740 million years after the Bang, and we can’t explain how it grew so big so fast. We’ve seen a dust cloud orbiting a new star, presumably with planets inside. We’ve seen binary Jupiter mass objects in the Orion nebula – so planets don’t always form around stars. We’ve still got the twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy and we’ve got a new mystery – we have two ways to measure the expansion rate of the universe, and they don’t agree.

Dr. John Mather was Senior Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, leading the science teams from 1995 to 2023. He is now working with teams to conceive hybrid observatories, combining a telescope on the ground with something in space to make it far more powerful. As a postdoc at NASA’s GISS in 1974, he led the proposal efforts for the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), whose science lead to the establishment cosmology as a precision science. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 with George Smoot.

The library's “Science and Society - Making Sense of the World Around Us” lecture series is co-organized and moderated by Fred Dylla, Executive Director Emeritus of the American Institute of Physics and author of Scientific Journeys, Linda Dylla, former public information officer at the Jefferson Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy, and Colin Norman, the former News Editor at Science.

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