Dancing with the stars: Nobel Prize-winning scientist revels in the possibilities and surprises of probing space

John Mather, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who surveys galaxies like shoppers scout out aisles in a new superstore, delights in the surprises yielded by space exploration.

“The earliest galaxies are pretty different from what we were expecting,” Mather said during an interview this week at the Physics & Astronomy and Interdisciplinary Sciences (PAIS) building on the University of New Mexico campus.

“They are bigger, brighter, hotter and more massive,” he said.

Mather, 77, is an astrophysicist intimately involved with the development and deployment of the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), both revolutionary cosmos-probing devices.

COBE, a NASA satellite, investigated the microwave radiation that fills space and provides information about the early universe. Work done by Mather and astrophysicist George Smoot on COBE advanced the Big Bang theory, which says our universe expanded from a very dense and extremely hot single point, and earned the two men the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics.

Mather was senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope project from 1995 to 2003. He serves now as JWST’s senior astrophysicist and will give a public talk titled “Opening the Infrared Treasure Chest with JWST” at 7 p.m. Thursday in room 1100 of the PAIS building. Admission is free.

JWST, which measures about 70 feet by 46 feet, is designed to do infrared astronomy, to see things invisible to the human eye. Its primary mirror has a diameter of 21 feet and is made up of 18 separate hexagonal mirrors. JWST’s high-resolution, high-sensitivity instruments permit it to observe objects too old, distant or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, to see.

Named for former NASA administrator James E. Webb, JWST was launched on a rocket on Christmas Day 2021 and attained solar orbit about 930,000 miles from Earth in January 2022. The first image from the telescope was released in July 2022.

“It was a picture of a lot of galaxies all at once,” Mather said of that image. “The gravity of the big galaxies focuses the light of the more distant galaxies, (making possible) incredible details of things we would not be able to see without that extra lens nature gave us.”

Webb will provide his interpretation of Webb images during his Thursday presentation.

“Where do we come from? Are we alone? I will talk about the great questions, how we know the story of the expanding universe, how we built JWST and what we’ve found out,” Mather said. “I would like people (attending the lecture) to be inspired to explore the beautiful universe we have.”

Born to science

Mather was born in Roanoke, Virginia, but grew up in New Jersey. His inquisitive nature, the need to know how things worked, was noticed early on.

“I’m told that when I was 3,” he said, “I was taking doorknobs off of doors.”

His youthful inclinations came naturally. His father was a scientist whose research was focused on the genetics of dairy cows.

“By the time I was 8, I knew science was cool,” he said. “I was curious, always reading, reading science.”

But he laid aside his books now and again to look for fossils in roadside streams, to fashion telescopes out of cardboard tubes and lenses, and to assemble radios from kits he ordered.

He earned his undergraduate degree in physics from Swarthmore (Pennsylvania) College and pursued graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, finishing there with a doctorate in physics in 1974.

“I did my thesis on a project — sending a balloon 25 miles up to measure heat from the Big Bang — that did not work properly,” he said.

But that project led directly to Mather’s work on COBE and to his Nobel Prize.

Looking for life

Mather was the keynote speaker earlier this week at the Reliability and Maintainability Symposium at Albuquerque’s Clyde Hotel.

“It’s a professional organization of people who make sure you don’t mess up,” he said.

Not messing up is crucial in space-exploration projects such as COBE and JWST.

“We test by sending commands to a digital (computer) model before we send commands to the actual space telescope,” Mather said. “We have lost space missions when someone sent the wrong commands.”

But considering the myriad things that can go wrong on complex space missions, it seems miraculous they often go just as planned.

Why is it that JWST achieved orbit in January 2022, but its first images were not released until July of that year?

“We planned it would take six months to get everything focused, and it did,” Mather said.

JWST’s mission is multifaceted:

• Searching for light from the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang.
• Studying galaxy formation and evolution.
• Learning about star formation and planet formation.
• Studying planetary systems and the origins of life.

“Most stars have planets, and 20% of them have planets of the right size and temperature as Earth,” Mather said. “Do they or don’t they have life? Right now, we have not found any that look promising. But we should be looking every place that is wet.”

Mission possible

As deep into science as he was when he was young, Mather said he could not have envisioned in the early 1950s that something like the James Webb Space Telescope would ever be possible. The fact that it does exist is a tribute to cooperation between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

Mather believes international partnership is key.

“These days, my perspective is that if it is not impossible, we can work on it,” Mather said. “When we put our minds to it and put our resources to it, we can do it.”