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NASA Nobel Prize-winner to Talk About the History of the Universe

A NASA Nobel Prize-winning physicist renowned for his findings on the early moments of the universe will be the speaker at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia and at the Virginia Air and Space Center on Oct. 3.

John C. Mather, a senior astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will outline the history of the universe, from its early moments in the Big Bang. He plans to illustrate with examples from NASA, including measurements of the Big Bang and discoveries by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cosmic Background Explorer(COBE) spacecraft.

Media wishing to attend Mather’s NASA Langley Colloquium Lecture Series presentation should contact Michael Finneran in the Office of Communications at 757-864-6110 or at michael.p.finneran@nasa.gov for badging and access.

Mather will also speak that night, Oct. 3, at 7:30 p.m. at the Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton, Virginia, as part of the center’s Sigma Series of free public lectures.

Oldest light in the universe

Mather joined Goddard in 1976 to help develop COBE, which revolutionized scientific understanding of the early cosmos. It precisely measured and mapped the oldest light in the universe – the cosmic microwave background. The results confirmed the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, and Mather received the Nobel Prize in 2006 for his work.

Mather has served as the senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope since 1995. He has a bachelor’s degree in physics from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and a doctorate in physics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Michael Finneran
NASA Langley Research Center
Hampton, Virginia 23681
757-864-6110
michael.p.finneran@nasa.gov