David Clifford Jewitt (born 1958) is an astronomer who studies the Solar System, especially its minor bodies. He is based at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is a Member of the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics, the Director of the Institute for Planets and Exoplanets, Professor of Astronomy in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Professor of Astronomy in the Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences. He is best known for being the first person (along with Jane Luu) to discover a body beyond Pluto and Charon in the Kuiper belt. His mother was a telephonist, and his father worked on an assembly line making industrial steel cutters.

Education

Jewitt was educated at local authority primary and secondary schools. In 1988, attracted by the powerful telescopes sited on Mauna Kea, he moved to the University of Hawaiʻi, becoming an Associate Astronomer in its Institute of Astronomy and an associate professor in its Department of Physics and Astronomy. Jewitt and Luu named the object after a character who features in the mythological poetry of William Blake, a writer whom Jewitt admires. (Blake in turn took the name from an ancient poetic term for Jewitt's native England.) Jewitt and Luu would have preferred to name the object Smiley after the protagonist of John le Carré's novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a favourite book of both of theirs, but they were unable to do so because the name had already been allocated to the asteroid 1613 Smiley in honour of Charles Hugh Smiley, an American astronomer.

Since discovering 15760 Albion, Jewitt has identified dozens of other objects in the Kuiper belt in a series of pioneering wide field surveys. Thanks to his work and the efforts of other astronomers, it is now known that the Kuiper belt objects are divided into four distinct populations. In what is called the dynamically cold classical Kuiper belt, of which 15760 Albion is the prototypical member, objects have orbits that are almost circular and only slightly tilted with respect to the orbits of the major planets. In the dynamically hot classical Kuiper belt, objects have orbits that are more elongated and that are tilted at steeper angles. In the scattered disc, also called the scattered Kuiper belt, discovered in 1997, bodies move in large orbits that are more elongated and more tilted still. The Resonant Kuiper belt objects move in orbits that are harmonically related to that of Neptune: the ratio of the orbital period of a resonant object to the Neptunian year is equal to one small integer divided by another. (The resonant objects in the 3:2 mean-motion resonance Jewitt has named plutinos, in recognition of Pluto's being the first of them to be discovered.) Mathematical models of the formation and evolution of the Solar System have indicated that in order for the Kuiper belt to have developed the structure that has been observed, the Kuiper belt objects and the gas giant planets must have come to their present orbits after migrating to them from elsewhere, pulled away from their earlier paths by their gravitational interactions with one another and with the disc of material that had coalesced around the juvenile Sun. In particular, it seems that Neptune long ago moved outward from an earlier orbit that was much closer to the Sun, and that the Kuiper belt objects, also originally closer to the Sun, were drawn outward with it.

In 1979, in his first months as a graduate student, Jewitt discovered the Jovian moon Adrastea on images taken by Voyager 2. but ultimately agreed with the International Astronomical Union's 2006 decision to reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet.

With the development of ever better telescopes and detectors, astronomers have been able to find moons that are ever smaller and smaller. Some astronomers have argued that moons smaller than some arbitrary size are unworthy of their title. Jewitt has dissented, asking "Is a small dog not a dog because it is small?"

Outreach

In October 1982, Patrick Moore interviewed Jewitt about his recovery of Halley's Comet in a special episode of BBC TV's The Sky at Night. A quarter of a century later, Horizon returned to Jewitt to interview him for Asteroids: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Season 47, Episode 6). Jewitt told viewers that he had found it difficult to secure enough telescope time for his trans-Neptunian research, and had only been able to achieve his celebrated breakthrough by looking for Kuiper belt objects on nights when he was supposed to be working on other projects.

Jewitt has also explained his work to non-specialists in articles in Scientific American, Sky and Telescope and The Sky at Night BBC Magazine.

Honours

In 1994, Jewitt was awarded the University of Hawaiʻi's Regent's Medal for excellence in research.

Personal life

In 1991, Jewitt met Jing Li (a Chinese-American born in Beijing, China), a Ph.D. student of solar physics at the University of Paris, while she was visiting the University of Hawaiʻi.

Select bibliography

{| class="wikitable collapsible" align="right" style="margin: 1em; margin-top: 0; font-size:89%"

! colspan="2" style="white-space: nowrap;" | Minor planets discovered: 48

</references> <!-- end of reflist -->

  • Curriculum vitae
  • Publications
  • David Jewitt website
  • about the Kuiper belt, Pan-STARRS, and icy main-belt comets