Review: Pillars of Creation

by Jeff Foust
Monday, February 17, 2025

Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos
by Richard Panek
Little, Brown and Company, 2024
hardcover, 256 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-0-316-57069-5
US$29

In just a few short years, the James Webb Space Telescope has become an essential tool for astronomers studying objects from within our solar system to the dawn of the universe. In one talk at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) held over the weekend, Adam Reiss, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe, discussed how JWST was helping refine measurements of the Hubble constant. “It’s the biggest improvement I have seen in my research career just by changing instruments,” he said.

In a presentation that followed at the AAAS conference, two other astronomers discussed how they’ve used JWST to peer into the early universe, looking for the earliest galaxies and black holes. “What James Webb has done is completely transform our understanding of how the first black holes likely formed,” said Priyamvada Natarajan.

The scientific successes of JWST in the last few years have now overshadowed the struggles of the spacecraft’s development that, at times, threatened the mission with cancellation. Finding the balance between the two has been difficult: one recent book, Infinite Cosmos, is filled with images from JWST but says almost nothing about the challenges in its development (see “Review: Infinite Cosmos”, The Space Review, October 28, 2024).

Pillars of Creation, though, manages to strike that balance. Richard Panek, who has previously written about cosmology (see “Review: The Four Percent Universe”, The Space Review, January 24, 2011), spends the first part of his new book examining the long and often difficult history of JWST’s development, starting from initial planning in the late 1980s for a successor for the Hubble Space Telescope through its construction, launch, and commissioning. That’s told from the perspective of many of the scientists and engineers who worked on its development, overcoming various challenges to get the telescope in space and working better than expected.

The second part of the book examines the scientific impact of JWST through four “horizons” of research: the solar system, exoplanets, galaxies, and the early universe. With such a wide range of options, Panek wisely focuses on individual scientists as they used the telescope to carry out research not possible before JWST launched. It is easy to get caught up in the intricacies of the science or the technical capabilities of the telescope, but the book reminds the reader that science is very much a human pursuit, from analyzing data late in the night in a hotel room during a major conference to debating the findings in meetings. One astronomer, working at home, received a JWST image so stunning that, in a desire to immediately share it with someone, showed it to her cat. (The cat’s reaction is not recorded.)

JWST is just now hitting its stride and could operate for 20 years or more, although it does face some near-term budget challenges (see “The lifecycle of space telescopes”, The Space Review, February 3, 2025). But work is already beginning on the Habitable Worlds Observatory, a telescope slated to launch in the 2040s, a point Panek makes in the epilogue of Pillars of Creation. It will likely face its own challenges in development, although hopefully less severe in terms of cost and schedule than JWST, and will, in time, potentially have the same impact on astronomy that JWST is making on the field today.

Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

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