A NASA scientist won the Nobel Prize for physics, NASA announced.

The Nobel Prize Committee chose NASA scientist and Goddard Fellow John C. Mather to receive the 2006 prize.

Mather currently is serving as senior project scientist for the NASA James Webb Space Telescope program.

Sharing the prize with Mather is George Smoot of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. They received the award for their work that helped cement the Big Bang theory of the universe and deepened understanding of the origin of stars and galaxies.