Princeton University Astrophysical Sciences 2024 Spitzer Lecturer

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has opened a new window into the early universe, enabling sensitive, high-resolution images of the near-infrared sky and spectroscopy of faint, distant sources. The JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) is an international collaboration pooling more than 750 hours of JWST time to conduct an ambitious study of galaxy evolution, concentrating on two areas of the sky called GOODS-South and GOODS-N originally made famous by Hubble Space Telescope. I will discuss exciting results from JADES observations about discoveries in the distant (z>10!) universe, only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, that provide new insight into the process of early galaxy formation and cosmic reionization. We discuss how our new constraints on star formation and galaxy growth at the very earliest times are rewriting the story of how the first galaxies form and evolve.