Science & Society Lecture to highlight space telescope discoveries Oct. 1

The Lewes Public Library’s Science and Society lecture series will welcome Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. John Mather at 5 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 1, for an online Zoom presentation titled “Infrared Treasures We Found with the James Webb Space Telescope.”

Mather was senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, leading the science teams from 1995 to 2023. He will share stunning observations JWST has revealed over the past two years, including a supermassive black hole whose rapid expansion cannot be explained, a dust cloud orbiting a big star (presumably with planets inside), and Jupiter-mass binary objects that orbit each other, indicating planets don’t always form around stars. Mather will explore the significance of these new discoveries, as well as the new questions and mysteries they have sparked.
 
To register for the online event and other upcoming Science and Society Lectures, visit tinyurl.com/LPLScienceFall24 or call the library at 302-645-2733.

Mather shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 with George Smoot. He now works with teams to conceive hybrid observatories, combining a telescope on the ground with something in space to make it far more powerful. As a postdoc at NASA’s GISS in 1974, he led the proposal efforts for the Cosmic Background Explorer, whose science led to the establishment of cosmology as a precision science. 

The Lewes Public Library’s Science and Society - Making Sense of the World Around Us lecture series is co-organized and moderated by Colin Norman, former news editor at Science; Fred Dylla, executive director emeritus of the American Institute of Physics and author of “Scientific Journeys”; and Lynda Dylla, former public information officer at the Jefferson Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy.

For more information, visit lewes.lib.de.us.