The data from the JWST is so incredible that even those who built it are questioning the previous science

UC Santa Cruz astronomer Garth Illingworth, former associate director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, has had an incredible career.

He devoted decades to striving to find and understand the most distant galaxies and was one of the leaders of the team that built the Hubble Space Telescope. And before the Hubble was even in the sky, he had already started developing the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) – yes, the James Webb Space Telescope, which is currently captivating earthlings with wild, beautiful images of our universe on a daily basis.

While most of us look at these JWST images and only see images, Illingworth and his colleagues see all that and more: data. In just a few months of operation, Webb has already offered an illuminating wealth of information—findings that have confirmed, disproved, and even disproved existing theories about the cosmos. Curious about what these dates themselves mean, we caught up with Illingworth to talk about space telescopes, far-flung worlds, and the ever-evolving scientific process.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Futurism: Your work was extensive. Can you tell us a bit about your research and where it took you?

Garth Illingworth: Sure, I’ll give you the scientific framework. I am an astronomer and my main interest is in the early galaxies in the Universe. Basically, 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, we live in a magnificent, wonderful spiral galaxy called the Milky Way. But we had to get to this point.

The beginnings have long fascinated me, ever since I saw the Hubble Deep Field in 1995 – the first deep Hubble image of an empty part of the sky that turned out not to be empty, but simply packed with galaxies. I’ve been working on this for about 25 years. In fact, back in the ’80s, when I first started thinking about Webb, we hadn’t even launched Hubble. Riccardo Giacconi, then director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, told me, “You guys really need to work on the next big telescope. Believe me, it will take a long time.”

At this point we had to do something pretty interesting. We had to project forward even if we didn’t know what Hubble would discover. We realized that we should go to longer wavelengths, we really should go to the infrared — we felt that there were so many ways to reveal aspects of the universe that Hubble would never reveal. It had to be a large telescope to work in the infrared. It had to be very cold, which meant it had to be far from here. Now when we look back at the drawings, these very silly drawings, it’s very different from Webb, but actually Webb works and has the properties that we thought it had at the time. It’s a big telescope, it’s infrared, it’s really cold, it’s freakin’ far from us [laughs].

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you and your team have discovered what is believed to be the most distant and earliest galaxy humans have seen, dating back about 400 million years after the Big Bang.

Yes. Amazingly, about seven or eight years ago, we found an object with Hubble that was about 400 million, 450 million years after the Big Bang. I think if you asked me 10 years ago if Hubble would have done that, I would have said no. But it turns out that right on the edge of Hubble we could find this early galaxy, and we could actually see it with the Spitzer Space Telescope – we could show there was a blur there. That was a real mystery for about seven years. We couldn’t learn much about it, but it pointed to a very interesting change in the way galaxies built in early times. The moment Webb was put into operation, the big question was: Is this object one of a kind? Or are there many others like this?

Within four days of the release of the Webb data in early to mid-July, we had already submitted a paper to the preprint server. Actually it was two groups doing it on the same day and saying we spotted a few other objects like this one and one of them was even further away. That was the kind of move we were hoping for from Webb – that it would broaden our horizons to earlier times, and it did it incredibly quickly and very well.

I think that goes back to the point of working on getting Hubble into space but already thinking about what’s next. Well, it seems like James Webb is going to happen very quickly – but that’s because there’s already such a large scientific base.

Yes, exactly. In the late 1990s, after the Hubble Deep Field came out, finding the first galaxies became Webb’s central goal. But it was precisely at this time that we discovered the first exoplanets. Dark energy and dark matter have been discussed. There were so many things Hubble found that we knew Webb would make a difference – we just ended up waiting 23 years.

When the first pictures were released in July, we had an hour where we all saw them for the first time. I sat in the same space telescope auditorium where we held the first meeting 33 years ago. It was a bit bizarre to sit there and look around, gosh, this room looks pretty much the same as it did when we first started talking about Webb, and here we are now seeing the first images coming in. And they are absolutely amazing.

A particularly interesting finding from the James Webb is that some new data appear to contradict previous findings. Can you tell us more about this early galaxy that was much more massive than previously thought?

Yes, of couse. So this one, which we’ve named GNZ11 – not a very imaginative name, but astronomers are pretty boring when it comes to naming objects [laughs] – indicated something unusual in these early times.

In the first four days after the Webb images were released, we wrote these papers and found that GNZ11 was not unique – there were other of these very bright, very luminous galaxies that we interpreted as unusually massive. Then, within a few weeks, there was another one, even further back in time, closer to the Big Bang, that was still very massive. That was really a surprise. We have to ask ourselves: is it really massive? Or does it have really unusual stars in it that are very bright but not that much mass? We just don’t know at this point, but Webb can answer these questions.

What we need to do now is go inside and take a closer look at these objects to see if we can learn more about what is actually in this galaxy. What the stars are like, whether there are many smaller stars that contribute a lot of mass. Theorists are now wondering: how do you build a galaxy like this so quickly, and also does it have a black hole that builds extremely fast? Have we been fooled? Galaxies can be pretty tricky. The universe can play with you even if you have Webb quality data, but not enough of it.

What do you think a situation like this says about the scientific process itself?

That’s interesting because I would say that in the past there was a very slow process of doing things. The data didn’t come very quickly. We spent a lot of time working with it, sometimes you had to go back and get some more. Then, you know, the papers would come out and we’d be pretty much final. Papers come out, everyone thinks, “Oh, that’s great.” Then a year later comes some new data that says, “Well, that was wrong.” You must realize that you can always be wrong, but when you are wrong you learn new things.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt particularly bad when people were intent on doing the best they could at the time and then going back and revising things. Being wrong isn’t a bad thing, it’s part of the process. And it’s probably inevitable at this stage.

Webb was busy. Is there an upcoming destination on the list that you’re particularly excited about and want to learn more about?

Yes, the large galaxy cluster image originally shown indicated what I think will be extremely valuable for learning more about galaxies in the future. But I don’t just want to highlight the distant galaxies – exoplanets will be amazing, and then of course those star forming regions like Carina and the Tarantula Nebula. These look great, but there’s also an incredible amount of science behind them.

And I would just say, you know, as I sat there and looked at the first images, I was just blown away by their beauty and the character there, the information. But one of the things I thought about afterwards was: In that hour, I saw about six sets of data. I have to say that’s more data than I’ve ever seen of anything in my entire life in any reasonable amount of time. Scientists will study it forever because there is so much information in it. And that was just a Boy Scout – I mean, that was tens of hours of time, so every year we’re going to multiply that by 100, 1000 times.

One of the things I get asked a lot is why is this important? It is a lot of money. I’ve thought about it many times, and I think humanity has a deep interest in where we come from. We are interested in how we came into being, how life came into being. And then you really go, well, we’re sitting on this little planet, how are the planets formed? You can ask that origin question, and that’s what astronomy is really about. Webb, Hubble, these things are just originating machines. And what I really like about it, in a lot of ways, is that we live in a very divisive environment, and that interest cuts beautifully through a lot of those areas, political and otherwise.

It’s one of those places where we still have some common interests – which we hope to expand on in the future! At least Webb should contribute to this.

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