When I photographed Ray Jayawardhana at Caltech, he told me about a letter he had written as a boy in Sri Lanka. He had been following the Voyager missions and wanted photographs of what the spacecraft were finding.
He typed his request on a pale blue aerogramme and mailed it to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. For weeks, he hurried home from school to check the mail. Then a large manila envelope arrived bearing the JPL logo. Inside was a book of photographs of Jupiter and Saturn, their moons and rings.
I could imagine him opening it. Those pictures had traveled an extraordinary distance before reaching his hands. Spacecraft had transmitted them across the solar system. Someone at JPL had mailed a book of them to a child on the other side of Earth. Ray remembered feeling that he could be part of this exploration.
His father had first made space seem reachable. When Ray was about four, they were in their garden in southern Sri Lanka when his father pointed to the Moon and told him that people had walked there. Ray was astonished. He could look into the night sky and see a place human beings had visited.
Years later, he went to Yale, then to Harvard for his doctorate in astronomy. He began investigating how stars and planets form, studying objects that complicate the categories most of us learned in school.
Among them are brown dwarfs. They can form much as stars do, from collapsing clouds of gas, but lack enough mass to sustain the hydrogen fusion that powers our Sun. Ray and his collaborators found evidence of disks feeding material onto young brown dwarfs, supporting the idea that the process that builds stars also operates on a much smaller scale.
Size alone cannot tell you how a world came into being. An object with a mass comparable to a giant planet might have formed independently, without a star to orbit. Finding these objects gives astronomers a way to test their explanations of how worlds form, including our own.
Ray also studies the atmospheres of planets around other stars. As a member of the science team for the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRISS instrument, he helps investigate what happens to starlight as it passes through a distant planet’s atmosphere. Different gases absorb particular wavelengths, offering clues to the chemistry and conditions on worlds too far away to see clearly.
He has continued his research while taking on university leadership, serving as dean of Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences and then provost of Johns Hopkins. In July 2026, he became Caltech’s tenth president. He also writes books and essays for people outside his field. I thought about that childhood envelope as he described his work. He knew how much a glimpse of a discovery could mean to someone far away.
Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The boy who wrote asking for Voyager photographs now leads the institution that sent them. I loved that connection, and the ordinary kindness that made it possible. Someone had read his letter and answered.
