David C. Jewitt

David C. Jewitt is an astronomer who studies the Solar System. He looks at smaller objects in space. He works at the University of California, Los Angeles and has several important jobs there.

Jewitt is best known for being the first person, together with Jane Luu, to discover a body beyond Pluto and Charon in the Kuiper belt. This discovery helped scientists learn more about space beyond our planet and the many small objects there. His work is still important for understanding our Solar System.

Early life

David Jewitt was born in London, England, in 1958. His family lived in a place called Tottenham in north London.

When he was a child, he saw bright streaks of light in the sky called meteors. This made him love space. Seeing news about NASA's trips to the Moon made him even more excited. His grandparents gave him a small telescope for his birthday. He used it to look at stars and planets. With help from his uncle, he built bigger telescopes and loved astronomy even in school. He joined a group of people who also loved stars and shared what he saw with them.

Education

David Jewitt went to local schools for his early education. He loved learning and borrowed many books to read. When he was about twelve or thirteen, a teacher introduced him to physics, which sparked his interest.

In 1976, Jewitt started his university studies at University College London. He studied astronomy, physics, mathematics, and other subjects. He enjoyed learning from a professor named Robert Boyd. In 1979, he graduated with top honors in astronomy.

He then went to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena for further studies. There, he earned a master’s degree in planetary science in 1980 and later a doctorate in planetary science and astronomy in 1983. He studied planets and comets using a large telescope at the Mount Palomar Observatory.

Career

In 1983, Jewitt began teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1988, he moved to the University of Hawaiʻi because of its strong telescopes on Mauna Kea. He worked there as a scientist and teacher.

In 2009, Jewitt joined the University of California, Los Angeles. He joined their science groups and taught there. By 2010, he taught in two departments, and in 2011, he started leading a group that studies planets and faraway worlds.

Research

David Jewitt studies many parts of our Solar System. He looks at the Kuiper belt, rings around planets, and how the Solar System formed.

In 1992, he and astronomer Jane Luu found the first object beyond Pluto and its moon Charon in the Kuiper belt. They named it 15760 Albion after a character from poet William Blake’s works. Since then, Jewitt has found many more objects in the Kuiper belt. He also discovered a moon of Jupiter called Adrastea in 1979 and was the first to see Halley’s Comet in 1982 as it came close to the Sun.

Controversies

When Pluto was first found, it was listed among the major planets. After David Jewitt and Jane Luu discovered 15760 Albion and many more objects in the Kuiper belt, it became clear that Pluto was more like these objects than the other planets. Some astronomers thought Pluto should not be called a planet. Jewitt didn’t think this debate was very important, but he agreed with the International Astronomical Union when they decided in 2006 to call Pluto a dwarf planet instead.

As telescopes and detectors got better, astronomers could find smaller and smaller moons. Some people said that moons below a certain size shouldn’t be called moons. Jewitt disagreed, saying it was like saying a small dog isn’t a dog just because it’s small.

Outreach

In October 1982, Patrick Moore talked with David Jewitt about his discovery of Halley's Comet on a special show of BBC TV's The Sky at Night. Later, in November 1985, Jewitt spoke about the comet again on another BBC show called Horizon. Many years later, he appeared on Horizon to talk about asteroids.

Jewitt has also shared his work in simple ways through articles in Scientific American, Sky and Telescope, and The Sky at Night BBC Magazine.

Honours

David Jewitt has received many awards for his important work in astronomy. In 1994, he got the University of Hawaiʻi's Regent's Medal for excellent research. In 1996, he was named Hawaii Scientist of the Year, and NASA gave him a medal for outstanding science. In 2012, he shared two big prizes—one for astronomy and one for astrophysics—with two other scientists for discovering objects far beyond Pluto.

Personal life

David Jewitt met Jing Li, a student from Beijing, in 1991. They married in 1993 and had a daughter named Suu Suu in 2000.

When he was young, Jewitt liked many things besides studying space, like writing, history, music, and learning about animals and rocks. Later, he enjoyed watching the old British TV show The Prisoner and listening to music by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis. He remembered meeting Xenakis while he was at Caltech as a special memory. In 2014, Jewitt talked about his hope for Earth’s future. He believed that democracy and science would keep growing and making the world better.

Select bibliography

David Jewitt has written many articles for science magazines. Some of his popular articles are:

• J. Luu and D. Jewitt: The Kuiper belt; Scientific American, May 1996
• D. Jewitt, S. Sheppard and J. Kleyna: The strangest satellites in the Solar System; Scientific American, August 2006
• D. Jewitt: What else is out there?; Sky and Telescope, March 2010
• D. Jewitt: Mysterious travelers; Sky and Telescope, December 2013
• D. Jewitt and E. Young: Oceans from the skies; Scientific American, March 2015
• D. Jewitt: The Kuiper belt; The Sky at Night BBC Magazine, November 2015

You can find a full list of his academic papers on his website at the University of California, Los Angeles.