Any trip to the dark night skies of our Southern California deserts reveals a vista full of wonder and mystery — riddles that astrophysicists like myself spend our days unraveling. I am fortunate to study how the first galaxies formed and evolved over the vast span of 13 billion years into the beautiful structures that fill those skies. NASA’s crown jewel, the James Webb Space Telescope, has delivered measurements of early galaxies so puzzling that, more than three years after its launch, we are still struggling to understand them.

My work on ancient galaxies may seem to have no relevance to the enormous challenges that confront our nation every day. But if we look back over the last 80 years, ever since World War II turned America into the epicenter of global science, curiosity-driven in

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