Professor Andrew Bunker

My research is on galaxy formation and evolution. I search for the most distant galaxies yet known - as we look far through space, we look back in time, and light left these distant galaxies well before the Sun and Earth formed. In my career I have used the Hubble Space Telescope and large telescopes on the ground (in Hawaii and Chile) to study these galaxies, and I led the first scientific paper on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field - the most sensitive image of the cosmos ever taken. In recent years, I have been using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, which launched on Christmas Day in 2021.

Since 2005 I have been on the European Space Agency Instrument Science Team for the NIRSpec near-infrared spectrograph on the Webb Telescope, and this instrument has been revolutionary in its sensitivity and ability to take a spectrum of many galaxies at once. This allows us to measure the distances of these galaxies, and to study the rate at which stars are being born, as well as the chemical composition. Elements heavier than helium are formed in stars and supernova, and not the Big Bang, and so measuring their abundances tells us about the formation and early history of galaxies. I am on the Steering Committee of the large JWST Advances Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) and I lead the selection of targets for NIRSpec.
 

Our JADES team have repeatedly broken the record for the most distant galaxies, seen when the Universe was a small fraction of its current age (just 3%). I lead a research group in Oxford funded by my Advanced Grant from the European Research Council called “First Galaxies”.

I have previously won the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Astrophysics, and I am an Editor of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. My career has taken me from an undergraduate physics degree and doctorate in astrophysics at Oxford to postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. I was the Head of Astronomy at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney before taking up a faculty position back at Oxford in 2008. I was awarded the Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2026 for "investigations of outstanding merit in observational astrophysics".