The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) successfully launched last year on Christmas Day. It is the largest and most sensitive astronomical telescope in space, working at infrared wavelengths 0.8-24 microns. Since completing commissioning in June, JWST has been making spectacular observations of the Universe. In this talk I will focus on what JWST is discovering about the most distant galaxies, within the first billion years of the Big Bang (at redshifts beyond 5). In particular, I will describe our observations using the near-infrared spectrograph, NIRSpec (obtained for our Instrument Science Team) as part of the JADES survey. With JWST, we can obtain spectroscopic redshifts for the faintest galaxies seen by the Hubble Space Telescope, and we can push even fainter with JWST NIRCam images. We can determine the star formation rates, metallicities, stellar masses and conditions of the inter-stellar medium in these distant galaxies to compare with lower-redshift samples and hence chart galaxy evolution. JWST observations will also address the role of star formation in these early galaxies in re-ionzing the intergalactic medium.
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