Liu Li Heng – The woman who received the Nobel Prize in Astronomy twice
Professor Luu Le Hang.
When mentioning famous Vietnamese-Americans in the world, Luu Le Hang is a name that cannot be ignored. As the first woman in the world to win the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics (considered the Nobel Prize in Astrophysics), Professor Luu Le Hang contributed to the discovery of 31 asteroids. Her name became famous worldwide after discovering the Kuiper Belt - a region containing hundreds of millions of doughnut-shaped icy objects that changed the astronomers' concept of the history of the Solar System.
Professor Luu Le Hang is currently 61 years old, originally from Hai Phong but born in Ho Chi Minh City. She then moved to the US with her family to live and study.
Professor Le Hang’s passion for space exploration came by chance. “Once visiting the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, I was fascinated by the images sent back by the spacecraft. Without hesitation, I chose astronomy,” she shared with the media.
That push led Liu Liheng to Stanford University, where she received her bachelor’s degree in science in 1984. She then earned her master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley. At the age of 27, she went on to receive her PhD in astrophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
During the period from 1987 to 1992, Professor Luu Le Hang and his teacher, Professor David C. Jewitt, set out to discover whether the Kuiper Belt really existed. Before that, the idea of the Kuiper Belt, proposed by Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper, was considered by many to be unrealistic. They asserted that the edge of the Solar System was clean and empty.
To get the correct answer, contrary to the majority opinion, Le Hang packed her bags and flew to Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where there is a state-of-the-art telescope located on the top of the nearly 4,000m high extinct volcano Mauna Kea to observe and record. While billions of people on Earth have gone to sleep, this woman starts her new working day. Not stopping there, working at an altitude of 4,000m, Luu Le Hang has to face all kinds of difficulties such as thin air, low pressure that can make anyone feel nauseous, uncomfortable, and have insomnia.
Luu Le Hang – Female professor overcomes prejudices to open up new discoveries
Kuiper belt.
One autumn day in 1992, while analyzing the images captured by the telescope, Professor Luu Le Hang burst into happiness when discovering a celestial body in the Kuiper Belt. The discovery of Professor Jewit and Professor Luu Le Hang put an end to doubts about the existence of the Kuiper Belt, opening a new direction in explaining and proving the formation of the Solar System.
Professor Luu Le Hang said that since then, the Kuiper Belt has revealed many surprising things that have significantly changed our view of the Solar System. Currently, more than 1,500 objects in the Kuiper Belt have been identified…
In addition to the prestigious Kavli Prize, also in 2012, in Hong Kong, the Shaw Foundation named the winner of the 2012 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, Professor Liu Liheng, for her contributions in identifying “trans-Neptunian objects”.
In recognition of her contributions to the discovery of more than 30 asteroids, the American Astronomical Society named the asteroid 5430 Luu after her. Since 1994, she has been a lecturer in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University. She then moved to the Netherlands to teach at Leiden University. Despite her fame in the field of astronomy, Professor Luu Le Hang has taken a different path to seek new challenges. She is currently a technical expert at the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sharing her passion for exploring the sky, she affirmed that she was lucky because she did not encounter any obstacles from her family. Her parents always respected all her decisions in life and career.
“Young people should try to find a job that makes you willing to devote all your energy, passion and time to it. Once you have found your passion, you should be determined to pursue it to the end,” Professor Luu Le Hang once shared.
In her meetings with students, Professor Luu Le Hang always encourages young people to pursue their passions. She is not afraid to guide and connect. “Science often moves forward in unpredictable ways! Sometimes it is guided by a theory, but that theory may be wrong, as in the case of Pluto; or there is no theory to guide it at all, as in the case of the Kuiper Belt.
So the most important thing to remember here is: If you are curious about something and you haven’t found a satisfactory answer yet, then do some observations or experiments yourself, regardless of what others say. Be persistent, my friends, because the solution is often hard to find; otherwise, someone else would have found it before you. And, finally, keep your eyes open, keep your mind open, because you never know what you might see tomorrow,” she shared with future scientists.
Comment (0)