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John C. Mather, a senior astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), has won the 2006 Nobel Physics Prize. awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Mather shares the prize with George F. Smoot of the University of California for their collaborative work on understanding the Big Bang.

Mather and Smoot were members of a science team that used NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite to measure the diffuse microwave background radiation from the first few instants after the universe was formed, which is considered a relic of the Big Bang. In 1992, the COBE team announced that they had mapped the primordial hot and cold spots in the cosmic microwave background radiation. These spots are related to the gravitational field in the early universe, only instants after the Big Bang, and are the seeds for the giant clusters of galaxies that stretch hundreds of millions of light years across the universe.

The team also showed that the big bang radiation has a spectrum that agrees exactly with the theoretical prediction, confirming the Big Bang theory and showing that the Big Bang was complete in the first instants, with only a tiny fraction of the energy released later.

COBE

The COBE satellite was launched on November 18, 1989, and involved more than 1,000 researchers, engineers, and scientists.

COBE team member Michael Hauser, deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, said: "I was surprised and delighted to learn of the award of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Mather and George Smoot for their discoveries of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation with NASA's COBE satellite. As a member of the COBE science team, I take great pride in this recognition of the COBE contribution to cosmological research."

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin had this to say, "I am thrilled to hear that Dr. John Mather has been selected to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics. John would be a world-class scientist no matter where he had chosen to spend his career, but we at NASA are enormously proud that he has chosen to spend it with us."

This is the second award in several months that has acknowledged the work of the COBE science team. In August, the COBE team was awarded the Peter Gruber Foundation's 2006 Cosmology Prize. The annual Gruber Prize, co-sponsored by the International Astronomical Union, recognizes those who have contributed fundamental advances in the field of cosmology.

James Webb Space Telescope

When the JWST is launched in 2013, it will probe some of the earliest stars in the galaxy that were born after the Big Bang. JWST will look deep into the cosmos to probe some of the earliest stars. The spacecraft will search for extrasolar planets and will explore the birth and death of stars and the birth and evolution of galaxies.

Biography of John C. Mather

Educational Background:

B.A., Physics, Swarthmore College (Highest Honors, Phi Beta Kappa), 1968
Ph.D., Physics, University of California at Berkeley (4.0 GPA), 1974

Brief Bio:

Dr. Mather joined the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland to head the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) Mission as Project Scientist. He has been a Goddard Fellow since 1994 and currently serves as Senior Project Scientist and Chair of the Science Working Group of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Mission. He is also working on the SAFIR , SPECS, GEST, and WISE missions. Dr. Mather's numerous awards include the John C. Lindsay Memorial Award, National Air and Space Museum Trophy, AIAA Space Science Award, Aviation Week and Space Technology Laurels for Space/Missiles, Dannie Heinemann Prize for Astrophysics, Rumford Prize, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences. He has been elected to the American Astronomical Society Council.

Research Interests:

Research interests include cosmology, far infrared astronomy and instrumentation, and Fourier transform spectroscopy.

This article was written with information supplied by NASA