Formed Too Fast? The Biggest Galaxies at Cosmic Dawn

Join us at the planetarium for a special science talk featuring Dr. Caitlin Casey, a Rock Bridge High School graduate, who will discuss her research discovering the universe’s earliest galaxies and some groundbreaking results from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Example galaxies selected from the JWST NIRCam mosaic spanning 98% of cosmic history.

Talk Summary:

The incredible capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope have allowed us to look back nearly to the very beginning of time, enabling us to observe some of the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. Before the launch of JWST, astronomers believed that the first few hundred million years—when the Universe was only a small fraction of its current age—were relatively quiet. To our surprise, we have discovered many more bright galaxies than previously expected. These bright galaxies challenge our understanding of how the first galaxies and black holes formed. In this talk, Dr. Casey will guide us through the journey of discovery in the universe's earliest moments and address some of the key questions raised by JWST’s groundbreaking findings.

Dr. Caitlin Casey is a native of Columbia, MO and a graduate of Rock Bridge High School.

Speaker Biography:

Caitlin Casey, a native of Columbia, MO, is an observational astronomer and Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before moving to UCSB in 2025, she was an astronomy professor at the University of Texas at Austin since 2015, and previously both a NASA Hubble postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hawai'i and McCue Fellow of Cosmology at the University of California, Irvine. Casey received her PhD in Astronomy from the University of Cambridge in 2010 funded as a Gates Cambridge Scholar by the Gates Foundation; she received her B.S. in Physics, Astronomy, and Applied Mathematics from the University of Arizona in 2007. She was awarded the 2018 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize by the American Astronomical Society for her pioneering contributions to observational astronomy before age 36. She has expertise in the most massive galaxies formed through cosmic time and uses an array of telescopes around the world and in space to answer fundamental questions about the growth of the first galaxies. Casey leads one of the largest observational projects on JWST called COSMOS-Web, which is a deep field about 200 times larger than the Hubble Deep Field.