Abstract:
David Jewitt will describe the first three known interstellar objects (1I/'Oumuamua, 2I/Borisov and 3I/ATLAS) from my perspective as an observer who has studied each of them in detail. He will discuss how we know that they are interstellar, what are their important properties, where they might be from, and the extent to which they are the tip of a ridiculously large galactic-scale population of similar objects.
Speaker:
David Jewitt grew up in working class London and became interested in the sky at a young age. Through (gratefully received) state-subsidized education, he went to the University of London, then moved to the US to be close to large telescopes, becoming a professor first at MIT, then the University of Hawaii and more recently at UCLA. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and recipient of the Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, for work done on the Kuiper belt.