This coming March 16, 2025 (Sunday) at 9:30 am Philippine Standard Time (9:30 pm EDT, March 15), the ALP Astronomy Experts Speaker Series will be having a Nobel laureate (Physics, 2006) for a speaker. He is none other than Dr. John C. Mather, a NASA Astrophysicist and the former Senior Project Scientist of the James Webb Space Telescope. Dr. Mather will talk on “Opening the Infrared Treasure Chest with JWST”.

Abstract:
The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on December 25, 2021, and commissioning was completed in early July 2022. With its 6.5-meter golden eye as well as cameras and spectrometers covering wavelengths from 0.6 to 28 micrometers, Webb is already producing magnificent images and surprises about galaxies, active galactic nuclei, star-forming regions, and planets. It extends the scientific discoveries of the great Hubble Space Telescope and ties the most distant galaxies to their origin story from the fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Scientists are using Webb to hunt for some of the first objects that formed after the Big Bang, the first black holes (primordial or formed in galaxies), and are beginning to observe the growth of galaxies, the formation of stars and planetary systems, individual exoplanets through coronography and transit spectroscopy, and all objects in the Solar System from Mars and beyond.

Dr. Mather will show how Webb was built, why it observes in the infrared, and highlight some of Webb’s most exciting current discoveries. The JWST is a joint project of NASA with the European and Canadian space agencies.
Dr. John C. Mather is a Senior Astrophysicist and was the Senior Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. From 1995 to 2023, he led the JWST’s science teams.

As a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Dr. Mather led the proposal efforts for the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite in 1974-76 and came to the Goddard Space Flight Center to be the Study Scientist (1976-88), Project Scientist (1988-98), and Principal Investigator for the Far IR Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) instrument on COBE.

With the COBE team, Dr. Mather showed that the cosmic microwave background radiation has a blackbody spectrum within 50 parts per million, confirming the expanding universe model to extraordinary accuracy.
Dr. Mather received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics along with George Smoot for their work with COBE.