May 20, 2026
Garth Illingworth
Discoveries from the James Webb Telescope

Garth Illingworth, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and Astrophysics UC Santa Cruz

Garth Illingworth has been exploring for the earliest galaxies in the first 1-2 billion years of the Universe. His early work was on globular clusters and nearby ellipticals, but then with the advent of the powerful instruments on Hubble he transitioned to working on distant galaxies. This search over the last 15-20 years has been enabled by the world's most powerful telescopes, the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea. Central to his research has been to use Hubble to look back through 96% of all time to find and measure incredibly faint, young galaxies that are the seeds that have grown into galaxies today, like our Milky Way.