Thursday, September 29, 12:00, ICFO Auditorium
JOHN C. MATHER
Senior Astrophysicist and is the Senior Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.$$ His research centers on infrared astronomy and cosmology. As an NRC postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (New York City), he led the proposal efforts for the Cosmic Background Explorer (74-76), and came to GSFC to be the Study Scientist (76-88), Project Scientist (88-98), and the Principal Investigator for the Far IR Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) on COBE. With the COBE team, he showed that the cosmic microwave background radiation has a blackbody spectrum within 50 parts per million, confirming the expanding universe model (aka the Big Bang Theory) to extraordinary accuracy, and initiating the study of cosmology as a precision science. The COBE team also made the first map of the hot and cold spots in the background radiation (anisotropy), now attributed to quantum fluctuations in an inflationary period in the first 10-36 sec of the universe. These spots represent density fluctuations that are responsible for the existence of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, due to the action of gravity, and their discovery was called “the most important scientific discovery of the century, if not of all time” by Stephen Hawking. The COBE maps have been confirmed and improved by two succeeding space missions, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP, built by GSFC with Princeton University), and the Planck mission built by ESA. Based on these maps, astronomers have now developed a “standard model” of cosmology and have built detailed numerical simulations that begin to match Hubble observations, and require the existence of both “dark matter” and “dark energy”, neither of which has been detected or deduced in laboratory experiments. Dr. Mather is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize in Physics (2006) with George Smoot, for the COBE work, and the NASA Distinguished Service Medal (2007). He is a member of many professional societies including the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Mather is now working with teams and committees to develop plans for a future great telescope capable of observing signs of life on planets orbiting other stars.