Illingworth was the deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute and has had a long career in astronomy.
He was a leader on the team that built the Hubble Space Telescope. Before the Hubble was even in the sky, he had begun to develop the James Webb Space Telescope, the one that's currently blowing Earthlings' minds on the daily with beautiful images of our universe.
Illingworth and his peers see more than just the pictures of the JWST. Over its few operational months, Webb has already offered an illuminating breadth of information, findings that have confirmed, confounded, and even differed existing theories about the universe. We caught up with Illingworth to find out what that data means for us.
The interview has been edited to make it more clear.
Your work has been long. Tell us a bit about your research and where it took you.
The scientific framework will be given to you by me. My main interest has been the early galaxies in the universe. We live almost 14 billion years after the Big bang in a spiral galaxy. We had to reach this point.
The Hubble Deep Field, which was the first deep Hubble image of a blank part of the sky, intrigued me for a long time. I have been working on that for a long time. We didn't launch Hubble back in the 80s. The director of the Space Telescope Science Institute told me that I needed to work on the next telescope. It's going to take a while.
At that time, we had to do something interesting. Even though we didn't know what Hubble would discover, we had to project forward. We felt there were so many ways in which we could reveal aspects of the universe that Hubble wouldn't reveal. The telescope had to be large to work in the IR. It needs to be a long way from here. When we looked at the drawings back in the day, they were very simple-minded and different from the ones we know today. It's a big telescope, it's cold, and it's far away from us.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you and your team discovered the most distant and earliest galaxy that humans have yet seen, dating back to about 400 million years after the Bigbang.
I agree. A few years ago, using Hubble, we found an object that was 450 million years old. If you'd asked me 10 years ago, I wouldn't have believed you. At the limits of Hubble, we were able to find a fuzzy blob in the early universe, and we were able to see it with a space telescope. It was a mystery for seven years. It pointed to a change in the way the universe was being built up. The big question at the time was if this object was unique. Are there many like that?
A paper was submitted to the preprint server within four days of the release of the data. There were two groups that did it the same day, and one of them was further away. We had hoped that this step would expand our horizon into earlier times, and it did that very well.
I think that goes back to when we were trying to get Hubble into space. It seems like the James Webb is happening very quickly because of the large scientific foundation.
Exactly. The goal of finding the first galaxies became the central goal of the project after the Hubble Deep Field came out. Around that time, we found the first exoplanets. There was a discussion of dark energy. We had to wait 23 years for the difference to be made because we knew that Hubble would make a difference.
When the first images were released, we were all able to see them for the first time. The first meeting was held in the same auditorium 33 years ago. The room looked the same as when we first talked about it, and now we are seeing the first images. They're incredible.
Some new data appears to be contrary to previous findings, that's a juicy revelation from James. Can you give us a better idea of the size of that early universe?
Absolutely, yes. Astronomers are pretty boring when it comes to naming objects, but this one pointed to something unusual at these very early times.
We wrote the papers in the first four days after the images were released, because we realized that GNZ11 wasn't unique, and that there were others of similar size and brightness. There was another one even further back in time that was still very large. It has been a surprise. We have to ask ourselves if it's big. Does it have stars that are bright but not big? At this point, we don't know, but we have someone who can give us some answers.
We need to look at those objects in more detail to see if we can learn anything. There are lots of smaller stars that make up a lot of mass. Theorists are wondering if this is a black hole that's been building rapidly in there, and if it's the same thing as this. Is it possible that we've been deceived? Galaxies can be difficult to understand. Even though you have good data, the universe can still play games with you.
Is a situation like this indicative of the scientific process?
In the past there was a very slow process of doing things. The data came in slowly. Sometimes you'd have to go back and get more time working with it. We'd be pretty definitive when the papers came out. Everyone thinks that papers are great. After a year, there is new data that says that was incorrect. When you're wrong, you learn something.
I don't feel bad if people take care to do as well as they can at the time, and then revise things later. Being incorrect is part of the process. At this point, it's likely to happen.
There has been a lot of activity by the man. Is there an upcoming target that you want to learn more about?
The big image of the cluster of galaxies that was originally shown will be very useful in the future for learning more about the universe. I want to emphasize that exoplanets are going to be amazing, as well as those star-forming regions like the Tarantula Nebula. There is a lot of science in those as well.
When I watched the first images, I was blown away by their beauty and the information they contained. In that hour, I saw six sets of data. That's more data than I've ever seen in my entire life. There is a lot of information in those and scientists are going to be working on them alone for a long time. We're going to multiply that by 100, 1000 times every year, because that was just a small sample of what's to come.
Why does it matter to me? It is a large amount of money. I think the human race is interested in our origins. We want to know how we came about. How do the planets form when we're sitting on a tiny planet? Astronomy is about the origins question. These are just machines from the beginning. We're living in a very divisive environment and this interest cuts across a lot of these political and other areas beautifully.
I hope we can expand in the future, because it's one of those places where we still have interests. That should be contributed to by Webb.
The scientists are puzzled because James Webb is seeing stuff that shouldn't be there.
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