David Kipping

Yeah, the James Webb Space Telescope is such an incredible instrument.

The data has just blown us away.

You know, when you build this thing and you look at it unfolding in space, you think there's so many ways it could go wrong that we all were just like, you know, this thing was 215 moving parts or something had to unfold.

In space?

Yeah.

The fact it just all worked was just remarkable.

And then when we got those first images, they just kind of blew us away as well, because we had sort of these engineering expectations of what it would do, but the data was just even better than that.

Of course, the first thing you want to do is point it to the most distant part of the universe and see what's out there in those darkest patches.

And so when it did that, yeah, it started finding a couple of things.

It started finding quasars, which are kind of the center of these very active galaxies.

These are supermassive black holes that have loads of crap falling in, and they're spewing out all this energy.

They're kind of feeding supermassive black holes.

And so we started detecting those way earlier than we thought the universe should be able to build them.

Because to make a supermassive black hole, I mean, these things are like 100 million solar masses, right?

Imagine that, 100 million suns have not only been born but died, gone through their entire life cycle, died, collapsed into a black hole, and then those black holes have presumably somehow merged together into this super behemoth of this 100 million solar mass thing.

So we're finding those just 300 million years after the Big Bang.

And that was like, hold on, that doesn't make any sense.

How can this be?

And similarly with the galaxies,

We were seeing these images, these galaxies, and you can date roughly how old they should be based off the redshift.