Name David Jewitt | ||
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Education California Institute of Technology (1983), California Institute of Technology (1980), University of London (1979) Similar People Jane Luu, Scott S Sheppard, Chad Trujillo, Brian G Marsden, David J Tholen | ||
Notable students Jane Luu, Paul Kalas | ||
"Primordial Ice Reservoirs of the Solar System"
David C. Jewitt (born 1958) is an English astronomer and professor of astronomy at UCLA's Earth, Planetary, and Space Science Department in California. He is best known for having discovered the first body in the Kuiper belt.
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Career
He was born in 1958 in England, and is a 1979 graduate of University College, London (UCL). Jewitt received an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in astronomy at the California Institute of Technology in 1980 and 1983, respectively. His research interests cover all aspects of the solar system, including the trans-Neptunian Solar System, Solar System formation, ice in the asteroids and the physical properties of comets. Along with Jane Luu, he discovered the first Kuiper belt object (other than Pluto and its largest moon Charon) in 1992 and subsequently identified dozens of additional belt members in a series of pioneering wide field surveys. From these, he discovered that the belt is dynamically divided into regions – the classical Kuiper belt (circular, uninclined orbits, exemplified by 1992 QB1), the scattered disc (also called the "scattered Kuiper belt", which bodies have large elliptical orbits with perihelion near Neptune, discovered in 1997) and the Resonant Kuiper belt objects, whose periods are related simply to Neptune's. Those resonant objects in the 3:2 mean-motion resonance he called plutinos as a reminder that Pluto is one such object. These resonant objects can only be explained if Neptune migrated outwards, opening the door to new models of the Solar System in which unsuspected planet-disk and planet-planet interactions can be important.
Jewitt is a member of several national academies. He was awarded the Shaw Prize in 2012 (along with Jane Luu of MIT Lincoln Laboratory) for the "discovery and characterization of trans-Neptunian bodies, an archeological treasure dating back to the formation of the solar system and the long-sought source of short period comets". He was also awarded the Kavli Prize (shared with Luu and Michael Brown) in the same year.
He is a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Jewitt is also featured in the 1985 BBC Horizon episode Halley's Comet: The Apparition (season 22, episode 17), which documents how — in October 1982 — he was the first to recover the comet before its 1986 visit.
He has also discovered the Jovian moon Adrastea on images taken by Voyager 2 in 1979, and is credited by the Minor Planet Center with the discovery of more than 40 minor planets. The inner main-belt asteroid 6434 Jewitt, discovered by Edward Bowell in 1981, was named in his honor. Naming citation was published on 1 July 1996 (M.P.C. 27462).
Publications
A selection of his recent publications includes: