One year ago,
NASA administrator Bill Nelson presented President Joe Biden
with the deepest image of the universe ever seen at the time,
the first full-color, fully processed image from the James Webb Space Telescope
in less physical space than a grain of sand on Earth,
Webb revealed a universe full of more wonder
and potential discoveries than we can even imagine.
It was a beautiful promise of things to come.
You know, when the first data came out,
you know, it was, it's emotional.
It's surpassing expectations and really, when you compare what we are seeing
and the quality of the data with previous missions, it's, it's mind blowing.
The part that interests me now the most is the most distant galaxies
that have been magnified the most by these lenses that Einstein told us about.
So we are seeing so much more than I ever dreamed possible,
and I just want to know what's in them.
The spectroscopy is really just, you know, transformational.
I mean, the
you know, the images are a lot better and they go to longer wavelengths.
But we've never had this kind of spectroscopy capability in space.
You know, that's one of the real transformative things
about JWST, is being able to see all these elements and everything.
Now, we can precisely say, no, I know exactly where that galaxy is
and we can start to study the physical properties of the insides
of those baby galaxies in the earliest moments of time.
It's really exciting.
With JWST there's more galaxies
than we expected.
Not a ridiculous number,
you know, they're within the ranges of different predictions.
It means that, you know, there's things that could be a little different
about galaxies in the early universe.
They could be more bursty in terms of their star formation.
And so, you know, whenever they're in one of those bursts like that, you see them,
and so there's more that pop out.
The stuff you're made of came from stars.
And if you want to understand the origins of everything in the universe
more complex than just hydrogen, you have to study these processes.
We're asking questions we didn't know we needed to ask,
and what's the next thing that we're going to find?
And what's the next question that's going to surprise us?
Or, the answer where all of our predictions are, not quite correct.
Which is the fun part of science.
When you're wrong, you're like, Oh, this is something new.
And that's when it gets truly exciting.