[UPBEAT MUSIC]
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, 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 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
that I just want to know what's in them.
The spectroscopy is really just transformational.
I mean, the images are a lot better.
And they go to longer wavelengths.
But we've never had this kind of spectroscopy capability
in space.
That's one of the real transformative
things about JBST 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 JBST, there's more galaxies than we expected--
not a ridiculous number.
They're within the ranges of different predictions.
It means that 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 whenever they're in one of those bursts like
that's-- 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.