The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) annual awards ceremony will be held at the UK’s National Astronomy Meeting on 23 July. This year’s awards include recognition of the significant contributions of two scientists to the success of the James Webb Space Telescope. The 2026 Herschel Medal, which honours investigations of outstanding merit in observational astrophysics, was awarded to Professor Andrew Bunker, of the University of Oxford. Prof. Bunker has been a core member of the Instrument Science Team since 2005 for the ESA-provided Near-InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument and has played leading roles in the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), undertaken as part of the Guaranteed Time Observations. In 2023 Prof. Bunker published the remarkable spectrum of the GN-z11 galaxy at a redshift of 10.6, giving new insights into the star- formation histories and chemical enrichment of galaxies in the earliest stages of the Universe. The full citation for the Herschel …
