VietNamNet Bridge – Two years ago, the 2012 Kavli astrophysics prize award was given to Dr. Jane Luu, known as Luu Le Hang in Vietnamese, who won some of astronomy’s most prestigious prizes.

Luu was born in 1963, and went to primary school in the south of Vietnam. She emigrated to the US as a refugee in 1975, when the South Vietnamese government fell.

She received her bachelor’s degree of Stanford University in 1984, master’s degree of the University of California at Berkeley, and a PhD in astrophysics at Massachusetts of Technology (MIT) in 1992.

With her innate intelligence and energy, passion and great efforts, Luu leaped to fame as a young woman with deep knowledge in astrophysics and won prestigious prizes.

After receiving her doctorate, Luu worked as a professor at Harvard University (1994-1998), then at Leiden University in the Netherlands (1998-2001). After that, she returned to the US and worked on instrumentation as a senior scientist at Lincoln Laboratory at MIT.

The most brilliant success of the Vietnamese scientist is about the solar system’s development.

Mankind’s understanding about the solar system has improved considerably over the last dozens of years.

The Vietnamese scientist, with her outstanding inventions, has helped enrich the knowledge the mankind in the last several centuries about the solar system and changed people’s perceptions about the infinite universe where they live.

Ten years ago, the solar system was described as a system of planets, where the Sun is at the center, surrounded by nine celestial bodies that bear the sun’s attraction. These include eight major planets and one “subordinate” planet, located in three groups.

The first group included four planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars – the small planets, solid and composed primarily of rocks and metals.

The second group included four large planets. Two largest, Jupiter and Saturn, are composed of helium and hydrogen, while the main components of the other smaller two, Uranus and Neptune are ice (water, ammonia and methane). They have very large sizes but have small density.

The third group was believed to comprise Pluto only.

However, the understanding about the solar system could not explain the phenomena and information collected by modern equipment used in astronomy.

Luu, together with her colleague David Jewitt, a professor of astronomy in the Earth, Planetary, and Space Science Department of UCLA, then decided to conduct scientific research work in an innovative and bold way – surveying slow-moving objects outside the solar system.

They successfully proved the existence of a belt which comprises numerous objects in the region of the solar system beyond the planets, extending from the orbit of Neptune to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is called the Kuiper Belt.

In 1992, after five years of working hard, Jewitt and Luu found a meteorite and named it 1992 QB1 which had the diameter of 280 kilometers, or 1/8 of Pluto.

This paved the way for dozens of discoveries by the research team and hundreds of other discoveries by the astronomy community around the world.

The discoveries all showed that there exist thousands of objects, from big to small sized,, from comets to interplanetary dust. Of these, five objects are bigger than others, including Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, Eris and Pluto.

These are called the dwarf planets because of their slight weight. The group of dwarf planets is exactly the third group of the solar system, which in the past was believed to consist of Pluto only.

For her great achievements, the scientist received many prestigious awards. In 1991, a short time after receiving her doctorate, she received the Annie J. Cannon Award from the US Astronomical Union.

And in recognition of her services of discovering more than 30 new small planets, one of the planets has been named after her, Asteroid 5430 Luu.

2012 was a really good year for the outstanding astrophysical scientist, when the name Luu Le Hang was named twice at ceremonies awarding two of astronomy’s top prizes.

In March 2012, the Kavli Foundation awarded the Kavli Prize worth $1 million to three scientists, including Jane Luu, to honor their great achievements. The Kavli Prize is considered a Nobel Prize in astrophysics.

In May 2012, Jane Luu’s name was once again named at the 2012 Shaw awards ceremony as one of the two new Shaw laureates. Shaw is considered the “Oriental Astronomy Nobel Prize”.

Jane Luu and her colleague, Professor David Jewitt, received the prize, worth $1 million, for their contributions to the naming of the Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs).

Tran Minh