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1:00

more. This

1:03

program is sponsored by the

1:05

Cauvly Prize, which honors scientists

1:08

for breakthroughs in astrophysics, nanoscience,

1:10

and neuroscience. The

1:12

Cauvly Prize is a partnership among

1:14

the Norwegian Academy of Science and

1:16

Letters, the Norwegian Ministry of Education

1:18

and Research, and the

1:20

U.S.-based Cauvly Foundation in Los

1:22

Angeles, California. I'm

1:29

Alan Alder, and this is Clear

1:32

and Vivid, conversations about

1:34

connecting and communicating. The

1:39

winners of this year's Cauvly Prizes will

1:42

be announced next Wednesday, June 12th, and

1:45

I'll be here to talk with two of them. In

1:48

today's episode, though, we're celebrating

1:50

two previous Cauvly laureates. My

1:53

guests are David Jewett and Jane Liu. They're

1:56

both winners of the 2012 Cauvly

1:58

Prize in astrophysics. for

2:00

discovering a missing part of the solar

2:02

system, a missing part that

2:04

no one realized was missing until David and

2:07

Jane found it. After

2:09

five frustrating years at the top

2:11

of an extinct volcano in Hawaii,

2:13

searching beyond the known planets, they

2:15

found a ring of leftovers from the birth of

2:18

the solar system, known as the

2:20

Kuiper Belt. Here's David

2:22

Jewett. Ever

2:24

since I first read about it, the Kuiper

2:26

Belt has intrigued me, and

2:29

you, along with Jane Lew and

2:31

Mike Brown, got the Caudley

2:33

Prize for discovering it. Tell me a little

2:35

bit more about it. What is it? How

2:37

would you describe it to somebody who's unfamiliar

2:39

with it? It's basically the region

2:42

of the solar system beyond Neptune

2:44

that was previously thought to be

2:46

completely empty. If you could see

2:48

a picture of it, if you could go outside the

2:50

solar system and turn back and take a picture, it

2:53

would look like kind of a

2:56

fat doughnut surrounding the solar system.

2:59

With the inner edge of the hole

3:01

in the doughnut being where Neptune's orbit

3:03

is, and then extending out to some

3:05

very large distance. What's in

3:07

it? What makes up the doughnut? It's

3:10

full of very primitive

3:12

objects. So bodies that

3:14

date from the beginning of the solar system,

3:18

objects that are very, very low temperatures, like

3:20

not many degrees above absolute

3:22

zero, in many cases very

3:25

icy objects. So in

3:27

essence comets, but comets

3:29

that we haven't until recently been able

3:32

to see. In fact, the Kuiper Belt

3:34

is the home of

3:36

the comets. It's the place from

3:38

which the comets enter the

3:40

solar system. I was struck

3:42

by the idea that the Kuiper Belt was named

3:44

after a great scientist, I

3:47

think Gerard Kuiper, who

3:49

said that there was nothing out there. And

3:52

that you found the stuff that was out there. Well,

3:55

I mean, okay, so there is a

3:57

law, right? There's some law that says...

4:00

Nothing was discovered by the person who's named

4:02

after him. And

4:05

in truth, the copper did anti-predict the

4:08

belt. And for a good

4:10

reason, a good but bad reason, he

4:12

thought that Pluto was this massive planet

4:15

that had so much gravity, it

4:17

would have kicked everything out of that region. And

4:19

he thought that because he made

4:21

an observation that turns out to have been completely

4:23

incorrect about the size of

4:25

Pluto. So he just missed the estimate of the

4:27

mass of Pluto by a huge factor. And

4:30

that's why he thought that. So what got

4:32

you interested in finding out if the Kuiper

4:34

belt is as empty as Kuiper thought it

4:37

was? In the mid-80s,

4:39

I was just thinking, you know, the strange thing is

4:41

that the solar system at that time was very empty

4:44

in the outer parts. And I just

4:46

thought, well, why would it be so empty? You

4:48

know, and the two possibilities were maybe

4:50

it's really empty or maybe just everything out

4:53

there is so faint that nobody had seen

4:55

anything. Maybe for a year or two, I thought, kind

4:57

of interesting to take a look and see if

4:59

there's anything out there. But I

5:01

didn't do anything. Then one day Jane Liu, who

5:03

was a student at MIT, at that time I

5:06

worked at MIT, came along and

5:08

said her project was not going well. Did

5:10

I have anything interesting to

5:12

do? And I said, yeah,

5:14

well, why don't we look for something beyond

5:16

Saturn? So Jane and I worked

5:18

together to run this survey.

5:21

We would go to the telescope together.

5:23

We would operate the telescope and the

5:25

camera and analyze the data

5:28

in real time, eventually,

5:31

first in Arizona, then ultimately on

5:33

the top of the volcano in Hawaii. And

5:36

then we carried on without a

5:39

lot of success doing that until

5:41

1992 when we found the first one.

5:44

And when you found the first one, it just

5:46

gives you this kind of certainty and motivation

5:48

to try even harder.

5:50

And then we found dozens within the next

5:53

year or two After that. The

6:00

decry prebuilt get forms is known. Well

6:03

it's. Actually turned out to be much

6:05

more complicated than anybody guest. So it turns

6:07

out the different bit they're different bits of

6:09

it which we also discovered, but different bits

6:11

of it. Formed. In different

6:14

ways. So. Part of it. Has

6:17

been there. Since. The beginning of

6:19

the solar system in pretty much the

6:21

same place. probably. Unchanged. Other

6:24

parts of it. We. Say that

6:26

was thrown their. I'm by

6:28

by the gravity of the giant

6:31

planet jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

6:33

So. Basically kicked out somewhere they

6:35

formed. And then dumped

6:38

him of various regions in which

6:40

contraband so kind of a mishmash

6:42

of different. Of for

6:44

my son mechanisms. But. They all

6:46

go back to the beginning of solar system. Taunt

6:49

the all. go back. For. A

6:51

half billion years. From

6:53

now. So. It is this very

6:55

primordial Such and such mean a fair statement

6:57

is. It's what the solar system was

6:59

like in the beginning. Of I'm

7:01

basically before the planet's can to

7:04

be. Does the Kiper belt. Influence

7:06

the planet's between it in

7:09

the sun. Well oh right

7:11

right now. The. Basically.

7:14

The Us was know right now. So.

7:16

Does because the mass of material in

7:18

the clapper built this se very very

7:20

small. It's about.one tense ten

7:23

percent of an burst mass. Now.

7:27

Get Out is so thought were dirtier than

7:29

the mass in the mood for example, but

7:31

spread out over this huge volume of space

7:33

so mass is pretty small. So.

7:35

Don't have much influence on the rest of the

7:37

solar system now. But. Ah,

7:40

for it so various reasons. Ah,

7:42

it seems very, very likely most people

7:44

are sure. That. Our

7:46

the mass was originally much bigger.

7:49

So. There are many i'm new models

7:51

of the solar system. That.

7:54

essentially require their confidence to

7:56

be been maybe year ten

7:58

twenty thirty times via mass

8:01

in the beginning. And

8:03

most of that mass has been lost. We've whittled

8:05

it down to a tenth of an

8:07

Earth mass, not very much. But

8:10

in the beginning, it was massive enough to

8:12

essentially drag the planets around. And

8:15

so it has led to this

8:18

phenomenon that we call planetary

8:20

migration. And in fact,

8:22

meaning that the sizes of the orbits

8:25

of the planets changed since the planets

8:27

formed. And that is

8:29

one of the main consequences, one

8:31

of the most scientifically important consequences

8:34

of the discovery of the Klaplar belt. That

8:37

the planet orbits that we

8:39

see now are not the

8:41

orbits they were born with. By orbit,

8:43

you mean the distance from the sun?

8:46

Yeah. Or the shape of the orbit

8:48

or both? Mostly both, but mostly

8:50

the distance from the sun. So for example,

8:52

Neptune is now 30 AU's from the sun,

8:54

30 times the Earth's sun distance. But

8:57

we think it started closer

9:00

to 20. And because

9:02

of kind of a drag, gravitational drag

9:05

from the Klapla belt, which in the beginning

9:07

was massive. Remember, Neptune's mass

9:09

is like 16 times the

9:11

Earth mass. So a 30 Earth mass

9:13

Klapla belt nearby is going to be

9:15

very substantial. That drag from

9:18

the Klapla belt on Neptune resulted

9:20

in the expansion of Neptune's

9:22

orbit in the early days of

9:24

the solar system. But not just that, changed

9:27

the orbits of all the planets. And

9:30

so the really exciting consequence of

9:32

having this Klapla belt is

9:35

that we transformed the solar system from

9:37

this kind of clockwork system

9:41

where everything goes around the sun, takes the

9:43

same amount of time, just repeats and repeats

9:45

and repeats. And it's really kind of boring,

9:47

I hate to say that, but kind of boring, to

9:50

something where the

9:53

planets can interact in much

9:55

more surprising and even stochastic

9:58

ways. so

10:00

unboring that we have to worry

10:02

about being bumped into by another

10:04

planet. This takes over millions of

10:06

billions of years, right? We're stable.

10:08

We've been here for four and

10:10

a half billion, so we're doing okay in that regard.

10:14

But there is this thing

10:16

called dynamical chaos, which is

10:18

very disconcerting. It means you can have a

10:20

system that just goes around and around and

10:22

around and around, and then suddenly, because

10:24

of this dynamical chaos, something

10:27

bad happens. So we think that

10:29

there is an opportunity for dynamical

10:31

chaos in the solar system. And

10:34

we think that there have been chaotic

10:36

episodes in the past in

10:38

the solar system. So, for example, the

10:41

thing that caused the Kuiper Belt to

10:43

lose most of its original mass could

10:47

well have been an interaction between

10:49

Jupiter and Saturn, which

10:51

is not now possible, but was

10:53

possible in the past because the sizes of

10:55

their orbits were different. When you

10:58

say that the Kuiper Belt was once richer

11:00

than it is now, where did this stuff

11:02

all go? Has it flown out of the

11:04

solar system, or is it still running around

11:06

in it? Yeah, we think that

11:09

material from the Kuiper Belt basically was

11:11

shot in all directions. So material that

11:13

came in towards the Sun, some

11:16

of it hit the planets, some

11:18

of it hit the Sun, and

11:21

then material going the other direction could leave

11:23

the solar system.

11:26

And then it would fly in the

11:29

interstellar medium basically forever, never to be

11:31

seen again. I

11:38

was interested because our show

11:40

is dedicated to communication. Right.

11:43

I'm thinking of how you, in one

11:45

lecture I saw, although it was for the general

11:47

public, I think, so you may have been more

11:50

free to use it as a sense of humor. But you

11:53

had those wonderful videos of

11:55

how unexciting it is to

11:57

movie cameras to watch

11:59

Astronomers. work because there were people at desks

12:01

looking at their computer and then they got up

12:03

and sat at another desk. That was about it.

12:06

That was the high point. And you were funny

12:08

about that. And

12:15

you tell the story that I

12:17

can only take an example of your humor

12:19

where you talk about working in

12:21

Hawaii at Mauna Kea and they weren't

12:24

too happy about, they weren't excited

12:26

about the kind of astronomy that you were

12:28

doing. So you had to tell

12:31

them you were working on other projects and use

12:33

the money for the projects you wanted. And you

12:35

said it might have been illegal. I think technically

12:39

it's not legal to use money for

12:41

one project for

12:43

something else. It was a charming moment

12:45

in your essay because it was

12:49

so open and honest.

12:52

That's what happened. Otherwise, you won't get a result. Well,

12:55

I guess it's not illegal as long as you

12:57

discovered the Kuiper Belt. And nobody checked to

12:59

be sure that I was doing what I said I was going

13:01

to do. Well, that openness

13:03

and willingness to be humorous reminded

13:06

me of Richard Feynman who

13:09

deliberately used humor in his

13:11

serious lecture. And

13:13

also what reminded me of Feynman was

13:15

you're saying that if you

13:18

have a strategy at all doing

13:20

science, it's the first to do

13:22

whatever seems interesting. And second,

13:24

stop doing it when the interest wanes

13:26

and then repeat. That couldn't

13:28

be better advice to people in

13:30

probably every field to do what

13:32

interests you. Yeah, I think so.

13:35

What's interested you since the Kuiper

13:37

Belt? Well, I mean the

13:39

Kuiper Belt is still interesting but I felt

13:41

that it was a case of diminishing returns

13:45

after the first 10 years or so. I felt

13:47

like the rate of discovery certainly dropped enormously after

13:49

we found most of the stuff in the first

13:51

10 years. But

13:54

with another student, Henry

13:56

Shea, who was and still is in

13:58

Hawaii, discovered

14:00

another population of bodies not far

14:02

away this time but really, really

14:04

close in the asteroid belt. And

14:07

these are things that we call

14:09

active asteroids. And the deal

14:11

there is that in the past, we

14:13

thought asteroids are just rocks. And

14:15

so, you know, rock is just a

14:17

kind of a dull thing going around the sun.

14:21

But we found a subset of

14:23

the asteroids which look like comets.

14:25

They are ejecting material as comets

14:27

do. And that

14:29

at first was completely surprising

14:31

and incomprehensible. But

14:34

it's turned out to be very exciting. Now

14:36

we have dozens of examples of these objects.

14:39

And it turns out there are many,

14:41

many different processes that can make an

14:43

asteroid eject material like a

14:45

comet. So one of them is just ice

14:48

like a comet. You can have ice that's

14:50

heated by the sun and that

14:52

sublimates and blows out material so it looks

14:55

like a comet because in essence,

14:57

it is a comet even though it's in

14:59

the asteroid belt. And in

15:01

the past, people would have said and did say, well,

15:03

that's not possible because the asteroid belt

15:05

is so hot, so near the sun

15:09

that all the ice would have gone, would

15:11

have already just sublimated, just fizzed away. But

15:15

now we know that didn't happen. So it

15:17

turns out you can preserve ice in the

15:19

asteroids for the age of the solar system,

15:21

which I think is pretty remarkable.

15:23

And then the significance of that

15:25

is that the part

15:27

of the asteroid belt where we see these kind of

15:29

freaky asteroids is

15:32

the place where for other reasons, we think the

15:34

Earth acquired at

15:37

least some, maybe most of its water. Now,

15:39

how did that work? That's an important idea

15:42

if that turns out to be true. How

15:44

is it thought of to work? In

15:46

the beginning, it was just Dave's hand-wavy

15:49

idea, but it turns out that Dave's

15:51

hand-wavy idea was essentially correct. If

15:53

you bury ice under a

15:55

layer of dust, you

15:58

can depress or suppress. the

16:00

rate of sublimation of the ice. It's

16:04

hard for the gas to get through the grains. It's

16:06

like a porous structure. It's hard to get through to

16:08

the surface, and so the ice basically stays there

16:11

for a long time. So the

16:13

picture there is being on the beach. Go

16:15

to the beach with your kid or grandkid or something, lie

16:18

down face up, put a t-shirt over

16:20

your mouth, and then get a layer of sand

16:23

on top of the t-shirt on top of your

16:25

mouth. And then I never knew this. So

16:28

far, I'm not sure I'm going to try it. So

16:31

what happened today? It's not such a

16:34

great idea because it's really, really hard to

16:36

breathe through even a very thin layer of sand.

16:38

Real hard. You discover

16:41

that it's hard to breathe, so that's an example of

16:43

the ice not melting. Yeah, and then you can

16:45

take the t-shirt off. But

16:48

that's a mechanism. So you try to

16:50

force gas through a porous medium. It

16:54

is actually very, very difficult to do that. So

16:56

it turns out people who have modeled this in

16:58

great detail find that even

17:00

a few feet of dust

17:03

is enough to preserve the ice below

17:05

it for a billion years. Wow.

17:08

So is the idea that one of

17:10

these asteroids with a lot of water

17:12

on it hit the Earth, or many

17:14

of them did? Yeah, not

17:17

one, but probably billions

17:19

in the beginning. Yeah. What

17:22

we found is that in

17:24

this picture, even an ice-containing asteroid

17:26

covered in this dust is inactive

17:30

most of the time. So

17:32

it turns out when we see one that's active,

17:35

it corresponds to about 100,000 that still have

17:39

ice, but it's not exposed. It's buried

17:41

beneath the dust. So when you see

17:43

one, you see 100,000. And

17:45

then when you work that out, all of

17:47

the asteroids in the outer part of the asteroid

17:50

belt could contain ice.

17:52

They're all ice-containing bodies. And

17:54

the asteroid belt has been discovered by

17:57

everybody and their dog and their child.

18:00

since the year 1801 when

18:02

the first asteroid was discovered. So

18:05

there's a fantastic example of this

18:07

population of bodies in the sky

18:10

that's been massively, massively studied for

18:12

centuries, and yet still you can go

18:14

and make a discovery right

18:17

there, right under our noses. So

18:19

that's very uplifting. Well,

18:22

this has been a wonderful conversation. You really

18:24

are an example of what more there is

18:26

to know no matter how much we think

18:28

we know already. That's science for

18:31

you right there, isn't it? I mean, that's

18:33

the greatness of science is you find something,

18:35

but it just opens the door to find 10 more

18:38

things that you didn't even think about in

18:41

the beginning. So it's like an expanding tone

18:45

or fan, you know, it just gets bigger and bigger

18:47

and bigger. The more you do, the more you

18:49

realize you don't know anything. That's

18:51

wonderful. I thank you for your work on that, and I

18:54

hope you'll keep watching the skies first,

18:57

our planet. When

19:03

we come back from our break,

19:06

I continue the remarkable story of

19:08

the long, frustrating and often disheartening

19:10

search for what most astronomers thought

19:12

didn't exist, this

19:14

time through the eyes of David Jewett's

19:16

collaborator, Jane Liu. Our

19:23

program is sponsored by the

19:25

Kavli Prize, which honors scientists

19:27

for breakthroughs in astrophysics, nanoscience

19:29

and neuroscience that transform

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our understanding of the very big,

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the very small and the

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very complex. From

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scientific breakthroughs like the discovery

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of CRISPR-Cas9 and the detection

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of gravitational waves to

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inventing new fields of research, Kavli

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Prize Laureates pushed the limits of what

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we know and advanced science in ways

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that could not have been imagined. The

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Kavli Prize is a partnership among the

19:57

Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, The

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Ministry of Education and Research,

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and the Us based Kavli

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is clear and vivid. And now back to

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the hunt for the Khyber built with causally

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prize winner. Just lose. Your

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life to me is such

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little girl would grow up to discover part

21:44

of the solar system that nobody ever thought

21:46

existed. Since I guess it's kind of thing

21:48

tantalus that I haven't thought of that that

21:50

way that thank you for saying it. When.

21:53

You family was able to leave Vietnam was

21:55

at a difficult moments. It was an

21:57

but. i was eleven at the time

22:00

And they didn't let us know how

22:02

dangerous the whole journey was going

22:04

to be. There was no plan. It was

22:07

toward the end of the war. The whole

22:09

country was in chaos. The president

22:11

had left already. And anybody

22:13

who had the means to leave

22:16

was leaving. And my

22:18

father just came home one

22:20

day and said, we're leaving tomorrow. He didn't have a plan.

22:22

He just said that we had to leave. And we

22:25

would go to the airport and just be there all day

22:27

long because he figured if you're going to leave the country,

22:29

the airport was a good place to be. And

22:34

so we would sit in the airport all

22:36

day long. And at nighttime, we would go

22:38

back to some place to sleep. And some

22:40

relative would bring us lunch and somebody would

22:42

bring us dinner. And

22:46

then, and just luck would have it, he ran

22:48

into an old boss of his and

22:50

he explained the

22:53

situation and the man, he

22:55

was an American. And I

22:58

think I can get you on to an

23:01

upcoming flight. So

23:03

the family came to the United States. I

23:06

take it with not much money

23:08

and not many prospects. No, my

23:10

mom said she was fully prepared that

23:12

we were going to sleep on the street.

23:15

She had packed some tickets. We were

23:17

actually prepared to sleep on the street.

23:20

So only a few years later,

23:22

you were accepted by MIT, Stanford, and

23:25

I think Princeton. Yes. And

23:27

your tuition was offered fully paid.

23:31

I believe so because these are the, I only

23:33

applied to the schools that offered

23:35

full financial aid if accepted. Those were

23:37

the only schools I applied to. When

23:40

you were headed for college as an undergraduate,

23:43

your father wanted you to study

23:45

mechanical engineering. Why did he pick

23:47

that? Because he thought it

23:49

was a dependable way of making a

23:52

living because engineers are needed everywhere and

23:54

he didn't really know anything about engineering.

23:56

I think he's heard of mechanical engineering.

23:58

That was it. hadn't heard of any

24:01

other kind of engineering. That's

24:03

funny, my father wanted me to be a

24:05

doctor because he had wanted

24:07

to be a doctor and

24:09

I didn't want to have to deal with

24:11

people who were bleeding. So

24:14

what did you say to your father? Well

24:17

I took a course in chemistry to

24:20

please him which I

24:22

didn't do well in because I wasn't really

24:24

interested and then I wound up

24:26

playing a doctor on television so we were both happy.

24:29

Well you did more for your father than I

24:31

did for mine. I didn't finish my course

24:33

in mechanical engineering, I really didn't like

24:36

it and then ran into some

24:38

friends and said oh you shouldn't, if you

24:40

don't like it try physics instead, it's much

24:42

more fun and then so I

24:44

did. So I just followed my friends advice and that

24:46

was about it. So how did

24:48

that lead to you teaming up with

24:50

David Jewett? A lot of

24:53

coincidences. I went to Stanford as an

24:55

undergrad and then after that I

24:57

worked at JPL and that

25:00

was the first time I saw pictures of the

25:02

solar system. And that got you interested in

25:04

the solar system? Because they were from

25:06

Voyager, the spectacular

25:08

images from Voyager and

25:11

they were all over JPL, they

25:13

were on the wall of the hall and

25:15

it was just

25:17

amazing. I guess never

25:19

seen pretty pictures of solar system before.

25:23

That was the first time I realized that

25:25

there were people who could study these pictures

25:27

and make a living at it and that

25:30

was amazing to me. And I did remember

25:32

talking to another friend he said oh who

25:34

are those people? They're planetary scientists. And

25:37

I said well where do you go to study

25:39

to be a planetary scientist? And

25:41

he said well Caltech is one place and MIT, he

25:44

mentioned a few places and I

25:47

wanted to try the East Coast because I went to

25:49

high school and college on the West Coast and I

25:51

wanted to try the East Coast so I applied

25:54

to MIT. So David was at

25:56

MIT? Yes. And how did you get

25:58

into studying the solar system? with him.

26:01

So I got into MIT and Dave

26:03

said something like, oh, I'm

26:06

going to be an advisor. And I remember saying,

26:08

oh, what do you want me to do? And

26:10

he says, whatever you're interested in. That

26:12

was it. And

26:15

so I found some position

26:17

in some another

26:20

group. And I did that for a little bit. And

26:24

that was very

26:27

satisfactory. And then I went back to Dave.

26:30

And that's when he talked about the idea of

26:32

the outer solar system being

26:35

empty. And

26:37

he was curious about why the outer

26:39

solar system was empty. What made him

26:41

curious? Because the inner solar system

26:44

is full of stuff. And

26:46

then the outer solar system,

26:49

in contrast, the outer solar system was very

26:51

empty. Jupiter is kind of like the boundary

26:54

between inner and outer. So

26:56

inside Jupiter, you have the terrestrial planets. You

26:58

have all these asteroids, tons and tons of

27:00

asteroids. So the inner

27:03

solar system is quite full. And

27:05

then from Jupiter outward, there was this odd

27:07

thing called Pluto. And that was

27:09

it. That's all we knew about. It seemed like

27:11

there's a sharp edge at Jupiter. And he said,

27:13

the whole solar system came from the solar nebula,

27:16

which is a big, fat cloud of dust and

27:18

gas. But it's unlikely that

27:20

such a cloud would have a very

27:22

sharp edge. And so if it doesn't

27:24

have a sharp edge, why does it seem to have

27:26

a sharp edge in our solar system? So

27:28

that's it. And I said, surely, if

27:31

there were things, people would have

27:33

found them already. And

27:35

he said, well, no, they could be really faint. And

27:39

I said, OK. And then we were talking about

27:41

how are we going to do it. And basically,

27:43

we had only two choices of detectors. There's

27:46

a photographic plate. They're very big.

27:48

They're glass plates. And they

27:50

have an emotion under the front that is light sensitive.

27:53

And that's how old time astronomy was done.

27:56

And they're fine, but they're not very

27:58

sensitive. You can't see very

28:00

few things on it. So we had

28:03

that as a choice. Then the other choice only

28:05

was the CCD is

28:07

the little silicon chip. It's like what we

28:09

have in our phones and cameras. Right. But

28:12

back then, a tiny little chip with not

28:14

very many pixels, and the

28:16

big photographic waves. I

28:18

said, this is pretty hard Dave. He said, Jane,

28:21

but if we don't do it, who else will? It

28:25

wasn't very popular as a research

28:27

project, was it? It sounds

28:29

like it was hard to get funding because

28:31

people were convinced there was nothing there. Yeah.

28:33

Generally, we were not very lucky

28:36

in getting telescope time at the national

28:38

telescopes, like Kid Peek and so on.

28:41

But we had time at the telescope

28:44

owned by our universities. And

28:47

so that's how we got started and we

28:49

kept going. Did you

28:51

find the first object in the Kuiper Belt

28:54

while you were there or when you had

28:56

gone to Mauna Kea in Hawaii? Mauna

28:59

Kea was what enabled us to do it

29:01

because Mauna Kea is such a fabulous place.

29:05

So how long were you there? The

29:07

conditions were really rough. I've

29:10

been invited to Mauna Kea a couple of times and

29:14

I don't think I'd enjoy the conditions. 13,000

29:17

feet up and it's hard to breathe. Is that the

29:19

beginning of the problem? Yeah. Right.

29:23

Well, we have a love-hate relationship

29:25

with that mountain because you know

29:27

it's a very, it's a fabulous

29:29

place to do astronomical observations. And

29:33

you pay a price for it, which is being

29:35

very uncomfortable most of the time. You

29:37

go up to 13,000 feet, there's not much

29:40

oxygen. So you

29:42

get headache, it's

29:44

very dry. So you get

29:46

dehydrated. So you can

29:48

try to keep yourself hydrated by drinking a lot, but

29:50

then that meant you had to go to the bathroom

29:52

a lot and that meant climbing stairs.

29:55

So, you know, there was... months

30:00

did you want to go that before you found

30:02

an object? We did five years of it. Five

30:05

years? Oh

30:11

my god. And you get

30:13

disappointed alive and I do remember saying things are

30:15

not going well. We've been doing this for a

30:17

while now. Like are we going to do this

30:20

forever? And he said, Jane, if

30:22

we find this thing, we'll never have to work

30:24

again. I didn't quite know what that meant. Like

30:26

will we be so rich? But I do distinctly

30:28

remember him saying that and it sounded so good.

30:32

We'll keep going. So you finally found

30:34

an object. What was it called? It was

30:37

1992 QB1. But you gave it

30:40

a funny nickname. We called it Smiley because at

30:43

the time I was reading the John Le

30:45

Carre books and I was so taken with

30:47

them and we had just found it. It

30:49

didn't have a name so we we we

30:51

called it Smiley. Now once you found

30:53

Smiley, was it then easier

30:55

to find others? Did you find others kind

30:57

of rapidly or was it still did you

30:59

have to wait another five years before you

31:01

saw another one? Well once

31:04

we we found it because we

31:06

had there was a new detector on the telescope.

31:09

A new detector. A new a bigger

31:11

chip and so now our field of

31:13

view became that much bigger. More pixels.

31:15

Technology helped a lot. What

31:22

does it mean now to astronomers

31:24

to know that there's a Kuiper Belt? What does

31:27

that propel us into in terms of new knowledge?

31:31

Well one important thing is that it's

31:33

consistent with the many discs that we

31:36

have seen around other stars. But

31:38

our solar system right now has no disc. Not

31:41

until we find the type of that we say oh

31:43

there is a disc. So that put us on the

31:45

same footing the solar system with

31:47

all the other stars where we see planetary

31:50

discs with planets are forming. So

31:52

that that really connects our solar

31:55

system with other planetary systems. Does

31:57

it give any insight into how the

31:59

solar system forms? It

32:03

confirms what we thought that everything the

32:05

solar system came from a big cloud

32:07

called the solar nebula but that

32:09

cloud is long gone and so we didn't

32:11

know how to connect today's solar

32:13

system with all the others planetary distance

32:15

we observe around the other stars but

32:17

once we found the Kitebabra we say

32:20

aha the Kitebabra is the

32:22

remnant of our solar nebula, it's the remnant

32:24

of our planetary disk so we have a

32:26

planetary disk like everybody else and it

32:29

tells us that planetary accretion happens

32:32

things accretion just means things

32:34

colliding and growing bigger and that happens

32:36

over a wide range of distance and

32:39

then things merge to form planets and

32:41

then there's always leftover always

32:43

there's always leftoversness the

32:46

debris the things that never

32:48

get incorporated into planets and

32:50

that's what the Kitebabra is leftover

32:52

debris do the objection

32:54

the Kitebabra ever leave the Kitebabra

32:57

either come toward us or go

32:59

out into space they

33:01

do we believe that the

33:03

suppliers with comets

33:06

that we see coming in we see

33:08

comets you know approaching the Sun and

33:10

they look beautiful with a big coma

33:13

and tail where do they come from

33:15

they come from many of them come

33:17

from the Kitebabra the Kitebabra

33:19

supplies us with comets what

33:25

was it like when you and David

33:27

joined in receiving the Kovli prize that

33:30

must have really kept many years of

33:32

hard work and torture on a Kia

33:35

prizes never ever occurred to us and then

33:37

I do remember when we first heard

33:39

the news I was sure it

33:41

was spam I was positively sure it came

33:44

in an email it was spam yeah and

33:48

because you've won the you've won a big

33:50

prize and have to go to Norway to

33:52

get it from the King that's

33:55

the most imaginative spam I think it is

33:57

I'd ever heard of I

34:00

mean, we were successful, but luck played a big part,

34:03

right? Luck plays a part in most

34:05

things in life. We were pleased, we

34:07

made some great discoveries, but the idea

34:10

of getting prizes, honestly, has never occurred

34:12

to either of us. So the whole

34:14

Calvary prize ceremony, that was very surreal.

34:17

It's kind of impressive when the king walks over

34:19

and gives you the prize. That is true. One

34:23

of the things that resulted from your

34:25

discoveries was that Pluto got demoted,

34:27

no longer called the planet. Did it

34:29

amuse you or bother you when actual

34:31

scientists got upset for kids that they

34:33

thought it should still be called the

34:35

planet? How do you feel about it?

34:38

It is what it is. So it

34:40

involved in me one way or the other. I

34:42

was happy that the puzzle got completed. You

34:45

put together a jigsaw puzzle and there were

34:47

missing pieces and you just didn't know, like,

34:49

where did this thing go? How

34:52

did this thing fit in? And then you

34:54

get and then you find the right piece and it

34:56

fits in perfectly. And there's a

34:58

eureka moment and you're very happy about

35:00

it. I didn't give it much thought

35:02

about, oh, now I need to demote

35:04

Pluto. Things

35:07

make sense now. And aren't

35:09

there other bodies in the Kuiper Belt

35:11

that give Pluto a run for its

35:13

money in terms of mass? Oh, yeah,

35:15

they're on the order of I think I

35:18

when I was at Harvard, I think I gave a talk

35:20

and the question was that the title was how many plutus

35:22

was there? And the answer

35:24

was about five. Wow.

35:27

About five. And it's about right. It's

35:29

about five. You know, I was

35:31

interested in what you were doing since

35:33

you discovered with Dave Jewett, the Kuiper

35:35

Belt. Yeah. And it

35:37

sounds like you've made your father happy.

35:39

You're going back to engineering. Because

35:44

I also wanted to do other

35:46

things. And

35:49

academia was fun and hard.

35:53

It's so intensely competitive. You

35:55

know that. And

35:58

sometimes you feel like, OK. I

36:01

made my mark in this field. I'll

36:03

have to work in it forever because

36:07

that's what I'm expected to do. And

36:11

I just didn't want to be locked into anything.

36:14

So I decided I would give something else

36:16

a try. What kind

36:18

of engineering are you engaged in? I

36:21

was at LinkedIn lab. I worked on

36:23

different detectors. I work on

36:25

LiDAR systems. With LiDAR, in astronomy, you

36:27

just rely on the sun and for

36:30

light. With LiDAR, you make your own

36:32

sun. So you have to

36:34

send out a laser beam and use your

36:36

own light to detect anything. Isn't that amazing?

36:39

I think it's amazing. I mainly use

36:41

laser beams to scare the geese off my

36:44

grass. So you can do

36:46

that much

36:48

further away. Just go much further. As

36:52

far as the moon. So is

36:54

that what you've been doing since the

36:56

Cauvly Prize? So I

36:59

did that for a while. Then I

37:01

discovered that I still like being

37:03

a scientist the best. Being an

37:05

engineer is nice and you solve

37:08

very practical problems. But

37:11

still figuring out what

37:13

nature does is still the

37:15

best fun. So

37:18

I'm doing astronomy again. I told

37:20

you in the beginning this was an interesting story to

37:22

me. It's kind of an amazing story. It

37:24

makes me think that there's

37:27

a little girl playing in an

37:29

alley somewhere in Beijing or Bangladesh

37:32

who if she

37:34

could find the right path could

37:36

discover the equivalent of

37:38

another Kuiper Belt. Hopefully. Hopefully

37:41

there are lots of things to be discovered in

37:44

the OSBA solar system. I

37:46

don't know what they're going to be. But the

37:48

solar system is barely explored. We know the region

37:50

near the sun. We know the region near the

37:52

earth. But you don't have to

37:54

go out very far. And then we say no

37:57

idea. And for the

37:59

Kuiper Belt we know the... inner edge because that's

38:01

the region that is easiest to see things.

38:03

So we know the edge of the type

38:05

of belt, but again, you don't have to

38:07

go very far and then have no idea what's

38:10

beyond the closest part. Well,

38:13

your excitement about the search is contagious.

38:17

And I thank you for that. And I thank

38:19

you for taking the time to be on the

38:21

podcast with me. It was really fun talking with

38:23

you. It was really fun. Thanks for talking to

38:25

me. Thank you. This

38:33

program is sponsored by the

38:35

Cauley Prize, which honors scientists

38:37

for breakthroughs in astrophysics, nanoscience

38:39

and neuroscience. The

38:42

Cauley Prize is a partnership among

38:44

the Norwegian Academy of Science and

38:46

Letters, the Norwegian Ministry of Education

38:48

and Research, and the

38:50

U.S.-based Cauley Foundation in Los

38:52

Angeles, California. David

38:55

Jewett is a distinguished professor at the

38:57

Earth Planetary and Space Studies Department at

38:59

UCLA. Jane

39:02

Liu is currently a professor at

39:04

the Center for Planetary Habitability at

39:06

the University of Oslo after

39:09

spending several years as an

39:11

instrumentation engineer at MIT's Lincoln

39:13

Laboratory. The third

39:15

recipient of the 2012 Cauley Prize

39:18

for astrophysics was Michael Brown. It's

39:20

known for demoting Pluto from a planet

39:22

to being just a humble member of

39:25

the Kuiper Belt, along with four other

39:27

dwarf planets. Mike was

39:29

a guest on Clear and Vivid in June 2022. Next

39:40

in our series of conversations, I'll be talking

39:42

with two of the winners of this year's

39:44

Cauley Prize. The prize announcements will

39:46

be made on June 12th. So

39:49

next week, Clear and Vivid will be

39:51

moving from our usual Tuesday slot to

39:53

Wednesday. We'll be back to

39:55

a regular Tuesday the following week with conversations

39:58

with two more 20-20- for

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