STScI Scientists Part of Collaboration Receiving 2027 Berkeley Prize

Scientists from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) 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.

According to the prize citation, the UNCOVER collaboration is being honored with the 2027 Berkeley prize for "combining the power of telescopes and gravitational lenses to reveal the contents of the distant universe. Through spectroscopic studies, the team has discovered galaxies at cosmic dawn, including large populations of luminous galaxies and supermassive black holes in the early universe."

UNCOVER is a Cycle 1 Treasury program on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. UNCOVER - which stands for Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam Observations before the Epoch of Reionization - conducted ultradeep imaging and spectroscopy of and around Abell 2744, a massive group of galaxies also known as "Pandora's Cluster." The large mass of this cluster causes it to act as a powerful magnifying glass, bending the light from faraway background galaxies in a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.

The primary science goals of the UNCOVER program are to constrain the physical properties of the first galaxies that formed in the universe; to explore how and when galaxies irradiated their environment and reionized the surrounding neutral gas; to discover dust-obscured galaxies out to a high redshift to probe star formation early in the universe; and to build a fuller picture of star formation quenching in galaxies over cosmic time.

Awarded annually since 2011 by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and supported by a grant from The New York Community Trust, the Berkeley prize includes a monetary award and an invitation to give the closing plenary lecture at the AAS winter meeting. The 249th AAS meeting will be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, from 10 to 14 January 2027.

Each year the three AAS Vice Presidents, in consultation with the Editor in Chief of the AAS journals, select the Berkeley prize winner for meritorious research published within the preceding 12 months. This year's prize recognizes the UNCOVER team for three recent articles published in The Astrophysical Journal. The first and the second present an overview of the UNCOVER project, summarize its science goals, and characterize the initial imaging and final spectroscopy from the project. The third introduces a key result from the project: evidence that the population of faint, compact "little red dots" seen by JWST in the early universe is dominated by reddened, actively accreting black holes rather than simply dusty star-forming galaxies. The team showed that these reddened active galactic nuclei are far more numerous at high redshifts than previously recognized.

The UNCOVER team consists of more than 50 people located across the globe co-led by Sedona Price at STScI, and including STScI astronomers Dan Coe and Susan Kassin, along with Camilla Pacifici, formerly at STScI. The Berkeley prize will be accepted on behalf of the collaboration by Ivo Labbé (Swinburne University of Technology) who, along with Rachel Bezanson, is the co-principal investigator of UNCOVER.

The Space Telescope Science Institute is expanding the frontiers of space astronomy by hosting the science operations center of the Hubble Space Telescope, the science and mission operations centers for the James Webb Space Telescope, and the science operations center for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. STScI also houses the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) which is a NASA-funded project to support and provide to the astronomical community a variety of astronomical data archives, and is the data repository for the Hubble, Webb, Roman, Kepler, K2, TESS missions and more. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.