Q&A: Astronomers Jewitt, Luu on winning Shaw Prize and science as culture
Winners of the Shaw Prize gathered in Hong Kong this week to collect their US$1 million prizes for their contributions to the advancement of science. In this Q&A, we talk to astronomers David Jewitt and Jane Luu, who share the prize for astronomy for their 1992 discovery of the Kuiper Belt.
This year’s winners are being honoured for their discoveries that helped re-write theories of the formation of planets and universe; explain how Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s and other neurodegenerative diseases come about; and shed light on how forces in the universe work through mathematics.
Q. What did your discovery tell us about the formation of the solar system?
Before, we didn’t have a good explanation for where short-term comets come from, now we know they come from this area in the Kuiper belt.
JL: Currently, scientists theorise that stars form in clusters with other stars. Before the discovery of the Kuiper Belt it was puzzling to scientists that our sun did not appear to have any companion stars. But in the Kuiper Belt, there were objects with strange elliptical orbits, which only occur if there was a force that had touched them. There is also a point where there are no more objects with classical circular orbits around 50 AUs away. It suggests that a nearby passing star scattered everything, and points to the fact our sun was also formed in a cluster.