"Discovering the first galaxies: from Galileo to the James Webb Space Telescope", this is the title of the conference organised by the INAF for Friday 31 May at 8.45 p.m. at the Gipsoteca of the University of Pisa (P.za San Paolo all'Orto 20) as part of the International Congress of Astrophysics, sponsored by the Municipality of Pisa.

Prof. Sirio Belli, an astronomer from the University of Bologna, will take us to the boundaries of the universe, where the most distant galaxies are to be found, the first ones born after the Big Bang. The ones that could only be seen by the James Webb space telescope.

Today's Universe is populated by billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars and planets. But galaxies have not always existed: immediately after the Big Bang, more than thirteen billion years ago, the Universe contained nothing more than an enormous 'soup' of elementary particles. How did the first galaxies form? And how did they transform over time, giving rise to the populations of galaxies of various shapes, sizes, and colours that we see today? To try to answer these questions, astronomers have built ever larger and more powerful telescopes that, like time machines, make it possible to study the light sent out billions of years ago by galaxies ever closer to the Big Bang. We retrace this extraordinary history, culminating in the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, with which it is now possible to see the very first galaxies.

The conference is open to all with free admission subject to availability.