Jane Luu

Dr. Jane X. Luu (Vietnamese: Lưu Lệ Hằng; born July 1963) is a Vietnamese American astronomer.

Early life

Luu was born in July 1963 in South Vietnam to a father who worked as a translator for the U.S. Army. Her father taught her French as a child, beginning her lifelong love of languages.

Luu immigrated to the United States as a refugee in 1975, when the South Vietnamese government fell. She and her family settled in Kentucky, where she had relatives. A visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory inspired her to study astronomy. She attended Stanford University, receiving her bachelor's degree in 1984.

Work as a graduate student and co-discovery of the Kuiper Belt

As a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she worked with David C. Jewitt to discover the Kuiper Belt. In 1992, after five years of observation, they found the first known Kuiper Belt object other than Pluto and its largest moon Charon, using the University of Hawaii's 2.2 meter telescope on Mauna Kea. This object is (15760) 1992 QB₁, which she and Jewitt nicknamed "Smiley". The American Astronomical Society awarded Luu the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy in 1991. In 1992, Luu received a Hubble Fellowship from the Space Telescope Science Institute and chose the University of California, Berkeley as a host institution. The asteroid 5430 Luu is named in her honor. She received her PhD in 1992 at MIT.