Right Place, Right Time

December 13, 2022 • by Marc Airhart

Like the Hubble Space Telescope before it, the James Webb Space Telescope has the potential to change the course of astronomy.

Telescope image of an orange cloud of dust and gas, pierced by white stars and galaxies

For graduate student Olivia Cooper, the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, comes at the perfect time to help launch her career studying galaxy evolution. Cooper works with University of Texas at Austin associate professor Caitlin Casey on the biggest project in JWST's first year—COSMOS-Web—which is designed to take the deepest images of the universe to date and reveal some of the earliest galaxies to form after the Big Bang. We talk with Cooper about the breathtaking images JWST is collecting, the complicated legacy of the telescope's namesake, why her fellow scientists are just as inspiring as JWST itself and what this moment means to her.

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