James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)

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Berkeley Prize: Project UNCOVER

Release date: 17 Sept 2026 12noon ID: 2026-407
STScI Scientists Part of Collaboration Receiving 2027 Berkeley Prize

UNCOVER project revealed JWST’s “little red dots” as mysterious, dusty black holes in the early universe.

Scientists from the Space Telescope Science Institute are members of the collaboration that has been awarded the 2027 Lancelot M. Berkeley–New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy as part of their work with the UNCOVER project. The Berkeley prize is awarded annually for highly meritorious work in advancing the science of astronomy during the previous year.

UNCOVER is a Cycle 1 Treasury program on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. This program conducted ultradeep imaging and spectroscopy of and around Abell 2744, a massive group of galaxies also known as “Pandora's Cluster.”

 

Article link:
https://www.stsci.edu/contents/news-releases/2026/news-2026-407/

Pic Description:
Astronomers estimate 50,000 sources of near-infrared light are represented in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Their light has travelled through varying distances to reach the telescope’s detectors, representing the vastness of space in a single image. A foreground star in our own galaxy, to the right of the image center, displays Webb’s distinctive diffraction spikes. Bright white sources surrounded by a hazy glow are the galaxies of Pandora’s Cluster, a conglomeration of already-massive clusters of galaxies coming together to form a megacluster. The concentration of mass is so great that the fabric of spacetime is warped by gravity, creating an effect that makes the region of special interest to astronomers: a natural, super-magnifying glass called a “gravitational lens” that they can use to see very distant sources of light beyond the cluster that would otherwise be undetectable, even to Webb.

These lensed sources appear red in the image, and often as elongated arcs distorted by the gravitational lens. Many of these are galaxies from the early universe, with their contents magnified and stretched out for astronomers to study. Other red sources in the image have yet to be confirmed by follow-up observations with Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument to determine their true nature. One intriguing example is an extremely compact source that appears as a tiny red dot, despite the magnifying effect of the gravitational lens. One possibility is that the dot is a supermassive black hole in the early universe. NIRSpec data will provide both distance measurements and compositional details of selected sources, providing a wealth of previously-inaccessible information about the universe and how it has evolved over time.

This image was taken as part of the UNCOVER Cycle 1 Treasury program.

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Ivo Labbe (Swinburne), Rachel Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh)
Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

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