Nobel Laureate to Present Lecture on his Work with the James Webb Space Telescopes October 3

Nobel Laureate John C. Mather will deliver the 2023 Chester Peterson, Jr. Public Lecture in Physics. This non-technical lecture, “Opening the Infrared Treasure Chest with the James Webb Space Telescope” will be held Tuesday, October 3, at 4:30 p.m. in Room 101 of Cardwell Hall at Kansas State University.

Dr. Mather is a senior astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Maryland. He has been leading the science team effort for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) since the project began in 1995. He holds a PhD in physics from University of California, Berkeley.

Mather is a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE) with George Smoot. This work led to the "discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation".

He will discuss the JWST, a joint project of NASA with the European and Canadian space agencies. JWST was launched December 25, 2021, and commissioning was complete by early July 2022. Webb is already producing magnificent images of galaxies, active galactic nuclei, star-forming regions, and planets with its 6.5 m golden eye, and cameras and spectrometers covering 0.6 to 28 µm.

Scientists are using JWST to hunt for some of the first objects that formed after the Big Bang and the first black holes (primordial or formed in galaxies). They are beginning to observe the growth of galaxies, the formation of stars and planetary systems, and individual exoplanets through coronagraphy and transit spectroscopy.

JWST can detect objects in the Solar System from Mars outward. It is even possible for the telescope to observe a tiny bumblebee (1 cm2) at the Earth-Moon distance, in reflected sunlight and thermal emission.

In this non-technical lecture, Mather will describe how the team built the Webb telescope, what they have found, and what the future might hold.

Refreshments will be available at 4:00 p.m. in Room 119 of Cardwell Hall.

Dr. Mather will also present a colloquium on Monday, October 2, at 4:30 p.m. in Room 102 of Cardwell Hall titled “New Technologies for New Astronomy.”

You can see more about the Peterson lecture at https://tinyurl.com/3srdnx6b.

The lecture is open to the public and is free of charge. Students, faculty and community members are encouraged to attend.

This lecture series is supported by an endowment from Chester Peterson, Jr. aimed at publicizing and presenting an annual public lecture series concerning cosmology and quantum mechanics.