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Through Pluto
Early life
Luu immigrated to the United States as a refugee in 1975, during the fall of Saigon. She and her family lived in refugee camps and motels before they settled in Kentucky, where she had relatives. She graduated from high school as valedictorian and then earned a scholarship to Stanford University, receiving her bachelor's degree in physics in 1984. Working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA after college inspired her to study astronomy.
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Work as a graduate student and co-discovery of the Kuiper Belt
As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she looked at links between asteroids and comets for her main PhD project. She also worked with David C. Jewitt to discover the Kuiper Belt, an area previously believed to contain no objects. 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 Hawaiʻi's 2.2-meter telescope on Mauna Kea. This object is 15760 Albion, 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 Phocaea main-belt asteroid 5430 Luu is named in her honor. She received her PhD in 1992 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Professional life
After receiving her doctorate, Luu worked as an assistant professor at Harvard University since 1994. Luu also served as a professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Following her time in Europe, Luu returned to the United States and worked on instrumentation as a Senior Scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, focusing on defense-industry projects, specifically lidar systems. Since 2001, Luu has been a member of the technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where her work has included the development of lidar-based sensing systems and related defense research.
In December 2004, Luu and Jewitt reported the discovery of crystalline water ice on Quaoar, which was at the time the largest known Kuiper Belt object. They also found indications of ammonia hydrate. Their report theorized that the ice likely formed underground, becoming exposed after a collision with another Kuiper Belt object sometime in the last few million years.
In 2012, she won (along with David C. Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles) the Shaw Prize "for their discovery and characterization of trans-Neptunian bodies, an archeological treasure dating back to the formation of the solar system and the long-sought source of short period comets" and the Kavli Prize (shared with Jewitt and Michael E. Brown) "for discovering and characterizing the Kuiper Belt and its largest members, work that led to a major advance in the understanding of the history of our planetary system".
Personal life
Luu enjoys traveling, and has worked for Save the Children in Nepal. She enjoys a variety of outdoor activities and plays the cello. She met her husband, Ronnie Hoogerwerf, who is also an astronomer, while working in the Netherlands in a tenured position at Leiden University. They have one child together.
Honors, awards and accolades
- 1991 Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy
- 2012 Shaw Prize in Astronomy
- 2012 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics
- The asteroid 5430 Luu was named in her honor on 1 July 1996 (M.P.C. 27459).
- She is a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
- 2026 Prix Jules Janssen by the Société astronomique de France (shared with David Jewitt)