Catz Fellow awarded Herschel Medal
St Catherine’s College is delighted to congratulate Fellow in Physics, Professor Andrew Bunker, who has been awarded the prestigious Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in recognition of his pioneering research into the formation of the earliest galaxies in the Universe.
The award, one of the Society’s highest honours in observational astrophysics, recognises Professor Bunker’s leading role in advancing our understanding of the high-redshift Universe, the period when the first galaxies were forming just a tiny fraction of the way into cosmic history.
Professor Bunker has made major contributions to the study of early galaxy evolution over more than two decades, working with the Hubble Space Telescope and large ground-based observatories, and more recently as a core member of the European Space Agency Instrument Science Team for the Near-InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec) on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
His research has repeatedly pushed the boundaries of how far back in time astronomers are able to see. Light was emitted from these distant galaxies long before the Earth and Sun even formed. Professor Bunker led some of the earliest confirmations of galaxies when the Universe was a billion years old, just 10 percent of its current age, a crucial era when the gas between the galaxies was fried by ultraviolet light into an ionized plasma. Professor Bunker was lead author on the first scientific paper analysing the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the most sensitive image of the Cosmos every taken, discovering a population of star-forming galaxies at this epoch. Many of these discoveries have since been revisited and confirmed using JWST spectroscopy.
Since the launch of JWST, Professor Bunker has played a central role in the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), leading the selection of NIRSpec targets and helping to obtain thousands of spectra of distant galaxies. The JADES collaboration has repeatedly broken the record for the most distant spectroscopically confirmed galaxies. In 2023, his team published the spectrum of GNz11, a remarkable galaxy seen when the Universe was just 3 percent of its current age, revealing surprising chemical signatures that have reshaped thinking about how the first galaxies formed and evolved.
Speaking about the award, Professor Bunker said:
“It’s a great honour to receive the Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. It has been a very exciting time to work on incredible data from the James Webb Space Telescope. With my colleagues on the JWST Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) we have discovered some of the most distant galaxies yet. The near-infrared spectrograph (NIRSpec) on JWST has revealed the chemistry of these early galaxies, and the rate at which stars are being born. The ability of NIRSpec to take a spectrum of many galaxies at once with great sensitivity has been revolutionary, and I warmly acknowledge the contributions of my fellow members of the NIRSpec Instrument Science Team. I work with a great team in Oxford funded by my Advanced Grant from the European Research Council called ‘First Galaxies’.”
Professor Bunker studied Physics and Astrophysics at Oxford before research posts in Berkeley and Cambridge, later serving as Head of Astronomy at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney. He returned to Oxford in 2008, where he now leads the First Galaxies research group and serves as an Editor of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. He has previously been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Astrophysics.
St Catz warmly congratulates Professor Bunker on this exceptional achievement, which reflects both his outstanding scientific leadership and the strength of the research community at Catz.
Read more about Professor Bunker here.
Read more about the Herschel Medal here.