COBE leader and team share cosmology prize

John Mather and NASA’s former Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) team are co-recipients of the 2006 Gruber Cosmology Prize for landmark studies confirming that the universe was born in a hot Big Bang.

Mather and the COBE team received the honor “for their groundbreaking studies of the spectrum and spatial structure of the relic radiation from the Big Bang,” the prize citation said. “With these results, the COBE team, led by John Mather, set cosmology’s agenda for decades to come and profoundly affected our understanding of cosmic evolution.”

The instruments aboard COBE, launched in 1989, looked back over 13 billion years to the early universe and found that it was hot, dense, and almost uniform; that it contained weak fluctuations or lumps that grew into the galaxies and stars visible today; that the fluctuations were the consequence of a Big Bang; and that the universe is filled with diffuse radiation from previously unknown galaxies, according to the Peter Gruber Foundation, prize sponsor. COBE was NASA’s first dedicated cosmology mission and was the culmination of a 15-year dream for Mather, who initiated the project in 1974 with a proposal to NASA. The COBE science team formed in 1976, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, built the satellite.

Mather, senior astrophysicist at Goddard’s observational cosmology laboratory and senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope , collected the prize’s gold medal and $250 000 cash award on behalf of the other 18 members of the team during an August ceremony in Prague, Czech Republic. Mather received half the purse and the other team members split the other half. On the COBE team were Charles Bennett, Nancy Boggess, Edward Cheng, Eli Dwek, Samuel Gulkis, Michael Hauser, Michael Janssen, Thomas Kelsall, Philip Lubin, Stephan Meyer, S. Harvey Moseley, Thomas Murdock, Richard Shafer, Robert Silverberg, George Smoot, Rainer Weiss, David Wilkinson (who died in September 2002), and Edward Wright.

Created in 2000, the Cosmology Prize of the Gruber Foundation, based in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, recognizes honorees for their groundbreaking theoretical, analytical, or conceptual discoveries. The prize is co-sponsored by the International Astronomical Union in Paris.