Princeton University Department of Physics
48^th annual Donald R. Hamilton Lecture

Marcia J. Rieke
Regents’ Professor of Astronomy and Dr. Elizabeth Roemer Endowed Chair
Steward Observatory, University of Arizona 

“The Search for the Most Distant Galaxies”
The James Webb Space Telescope was called the "First Light Machine" when it was being studied as a potential NASA mission.  It quickly became obvious that it would be impossible to prove that the "first" galaxy had been seen, but much more promising was looking for the most distant galaxies possible. This goal led astronomers to design a suite of instruments for the telescope that are optimized for looking for very faint galaxies at infrared wavelengths -- infrared is required because the expansion of the Universe moves the ultraviolet-visible output of galaxies to longer wavelengths. We have succeeded at finding galaxies seen at an age of only 290 million years after the Big Bang. Such distant galaxies are proving to have unexpected properties that  challenge our ideas of how stars are formed in these first galaxies.

Biography: Marcia Rieke is a Regents Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. Her research interests include infrared observations of the center of the Milky Way and of other galactic nuclei and observation of the infrared sky at as faint a level as possible to study distant galaxies. These research interests have driven her to characterize and develop large-format, low-noise infrared detector arrays. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She came to the University of Arizona in 1976 as a postdoctoral fellow and has been there ever since. She has served as the Deputy Principal Investigator on NICMOS, (the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer for the Hubble Space Telescope), the Outreach Coordinator for the Spitzer Space Telescope, and now is the Principal Investigator for the near-infrared camera (NIRCam) for the James Webb Space Telescope. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and was recently named the Professor Elizabeth Roemer Endowed Chair in Astronomy. In 2023 she received the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal and the Catherine Wolfe Medal from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. In 2024 she was awarded the Gruber Cosmology Prize. In 2025 she was awarded the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society.