Liberty Science Center was thrilled to welcome Mike Davis, James Webb Space Telescope Operations Project Manager at NASA, for a compelling Space Talk: Unfolding the Universe with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, on July 9, 2026.

Launched in December 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revolutionized how we study and what we know about our universe. Building humanity’s greatest telescope, though, didn’t just happen overnight. It took the work of over 20,000 people, beginning work in 1996, to get JWST off the ground and into the cosmos. Through his work as a Deputy Systems Engineer on JWST, Davis was able to detail for us how and why the telescope is built the way it is, including its staggering 21.6 ft diameter mirror and tennis-court-sized sunshield, which both needed to be unfolded in space, around 1 million miles from Earth.

One of the most important aspects of JWST is the kind of light it sees. The visible light that our eyes can see makes up a tiny fraction of all the different kinds of light that are out there in the universe. JWST primarily sees the universe in infrared light, light that is able to pass through cosmic dust, letting us see objects like the pillars of creation, a star-forming nebula, in brand new ways. Using the largest planetarium in the country, with our 8k projection, we were able to see some of the brilliant images taken by JWST in incredible detail.

The Pillars of Creation, a star forming nebula, seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in visible light on the left and by the James Webb Space Telescope on the right. Note how, thanks to seeing infrared light, JWST is able to see through and inside the nebula in the image on the right. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Hubble Heritage Project; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Infrared light is also important to observe in our study of the most distant galaxies in the universe. We’ve learned in recent years that the universe is expanding, meaning that things far away from us in space are moving away from us. Because of this, the light coming from them appears redder, shifting all the way into infrared. To observe galaxies billions of light years away we need a telescope built to see this infrared light.

This infrared image from JWST was taken for the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, or JADES, program. Other than some stars closer to us (the brightest objects seen with 6 spikes of light), almost everything we see in this image is a distant galaxy, billions of light years away. One such galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0 (shown in the pullout), at a distance of 33.8 billion light-years, making it the current record-holder for the most distant known galaxy. Because light takes time to travel to us, we are seeing this galaxy as it was just 300 million years after the big bang.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Phill Cargile (CfA)

We thank Mike Davis and the rest of the JWST outreach team who spent the evening sharing this incredible telescope with us! Join us on August 27, 2026 when we will welcome Dr. Seven Rasmussen, instructor at Columbia University and author of the upcoming book Cloudy with a Chance of Starships, for our next Space Talk!