Public Lecture: In Pursuit of the First Galaxies and Supermassive Black Holes

Antoinette de Vaucouleurs Memorial Public Lecture Rachel Somerville, Center for Computational Astrophysics at The Flatiron Institute In Pursuit of the First Galaxies and Supermassive Black Holes Since its launch almost five years ago, the James Webb Space Telescope has revolutionized our knowledge of the early Universe. JWST has discovered large populations of distant galaxies and supermassive black holes, forming when the Universe was only a few percent of its present age, with properties that are very different from the previously known and well-studied nearby galaxies and black holes. I will discuss highlights from these discoveries, and what insights we have gained from them into the physics of how galaxies and supermassive black holes form.