JWST UNCOVER Collaboration Wins 2027 Berkeley Prize
JWST UNCOVER collaboration including BGU astronomer Adi Zitrin wins the 2027 Berkeley Prize for revealing early galaxies and black holes.
The JWST UNCOVER collaboration will receive the 2027 Lancelot M. Berkeley–New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy. 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.
The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has opened the door to a spectacular range of observations that were previously out of reach. UNCOVER — which stands for Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam Observations before the Epoch of Reionization — is a Cycle 1 JWST Treasury program that 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. Lengthy dedicated imaging of this gravitational lens and deep spectroscopy of JWST-identified sources has enabled the UNCOVER project team to identify and characterize distant galaxies from some of the earliest stages of our universe.
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.
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.”
“It has been a great unexpected pleasure to receive the news about the prize, says Ben-Gurion University’s Prof. Adi Zitrin. “The UNCOVER survey has been one of the first programs executed with JWST, before we really knew what to expect, and has been highly successful indeed. It demonstrated the power of coupling JWST with lensing and led to the discovery of early galaxies as well as unexpected objects such as early black holes or ‘Little Red Dot’ proto-types. It has since opened the door to the discovery of many similar objects as well as to new lensing surveys with JWST.”
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.
“UNCOVER has fundamentally expanded our view of the early universe, revealing a population of distant galaxies and growing black holes that was largely hidden from previous observations,” says AAS Senior Vice President Ted Bergin. “Its discoveries challenge our understanding of how the cosmos took shape while setting a powerful example of how large-scale collaboration can advance astronomy.”
The UNCOVER team consists of more than 50 people located across the globe. The Berkeley prize will be accepted on behalf of the collaboration by Ivo Labbé (Swinburne University of Technology) who, along with Rachel Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh), is the co-PI of UNCOVER. Labbé will give the prize lecture on Thursday afternoon, 14 January 2027, at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.
