the Portico
“Our mission is to enhance the relationship between the University and its alumni and friends and promoted pride and commitment within the University Community.”
By Andrew Vowles
The telescope dome at California’s Palomar Observatory is normally a quiet place. So when applause filled that space one fall evening in 1997, it meant something unusual had occurred. Indeed it had, says astronomer and Guelph graduate John “JJ” Kavelaars.
Back up a few months to the previous summer. That year, Kavelaars was still a graduate student at Queen’s University. He had accompanied a colleague, Brett Gladman, to the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Mount Palomar. More or less out of interest, they’d gone looking for comets. But it turned out that summer was off-season for comet spotting. Prompted by Gladman’s supervisor, they looked for irregular satellites of Uranus instead. And they found them, although they didn’t realize it right away.
Using a telescope like the Hale to observe the sky yields more data and images than one can absorb at once. So it was a few weeks after that summer trip that Gladman reviewed their observations. He spotted something that made him pick up the phone to call Kingston. Twelve years later, Kavelaars, now a researcher with the National Research Council’s Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, B.C., recalls Gladman’s words.
“He called me immediately and said, ‘There’s something very odd. I think I’ve found a moon of Uranus. I can’t believe this has happened. You have to look at this right away.’”
Kavelaars checked the electronic images arriving on his computer, and sure enough, there they were — two tiny dots of reflected sunlight against black night.
“Our two careers were altered significantly at that point. I still remember the moment.”
Career altering? Two new chunks of rock found orbiting a planet in the outer solar system? Consider: Uranus was first sighted in 1781 by William Herschel, peering through a seven-inch homemade telescope set up in his backyard in England. Within a few years, he spotted two moons circling the planet. By the time Gladman collected his data from the Hale Telescope, Uranus had been in astronomers’ sights for more than two centuries, and 17 moons had already been recorded by subsequent viewers. No wonder Kavelaars was skeptical.
“This couldn’t be true,” he says. “How could we be finding satellites of Uranus?”
The pair decided they’d keep quiet until they’d had a chance to visit Mount Palomar again. That happened Sept. 6.
“We pointed the scope at the location where the satellite should be,” says Kavelaars. “We took an exposure, and there it was. I’ve never been in a telescope dome where the observers have cheered when they saw the first image. We were so ecstatic. There were shouts of joy.”
The Hale discovery knocked some of his own plans out of orbit. After finishing his PhD, he’d arranged to begin a post-doc at McMaster University to study globular star clusters. He did head for Hamilton, but with a new focus.
“When I showed up in September, I had transferred from a galactic astronomer to a solar system astronomer.”
He spent the next decade as a “moon hunter.” Along with colleagues, Kavelaars eventually found more moons orbiting Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter and Saturn. He’s named dozens of planetary satellites, including Saturnian moons dubbed Ijiraq, Kiviuq and Siarnaq to reflect his interest in native Inuit mythology. The moons of Uranus are named for Shakespearean characters, although Kavelaars points out a homegrown twist. He named one moon Francisco for a lord in The Tempest — and indirectly for his daughter Catherine Frances, 11. (Margaret, a moon discovered by another astronomer, is named for the servant of Hero in Much Ado About Nothing and happens to be the middle name of Kavelaars’s 13-year-old daughter, Ruth Anne.) What about his wife, Joanna Rippin? He laughs. “Try to find a Joanna in a Shakespearean character. She’s never noticed that.”
As for Kavelaars, his own name is attached to an asteroid named in 2007 by a colleague. That year was notable for the Guelph grad in another way, as he moved from seeking out moons to looking for other kinds of celestial objects in the Kuiper Belt. That region beyond the outer planets contains tens of thousands of objects, including remnants from the solar system’s birth. (Most of the Kuiper Belt objects are icy, unlike the objects made mostly of rock and metal in the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter.) Originally scientists thought the Kuiper Belt was a massive region, but more recent observations show that it’s much smaller. Learning why is part of Kavelaars’s research.
He’s also looking at objects out there with unusual orbits. Last year, he and other scientists found a comet in the Kuiper Belt orbiting backward around the sun. The comet, dubbed Dracula, is one of two such oddballs in the outer solar system, about 4.5 billion kilometres from Earth. The astronomers are now looking much farther out to where they expect to find a “reservoir” of Halley-type comets. He’s also looking at binary or paired objects in the Kuiper Belt, including one pair of natural satellites that orbit each other at roughly walking speed rather than a more customary tilt-a-whirl pace.
His goal? He hopes studying these leftovers will tell us more about how planets and planetary systems form, including gaining clues about the formation of the solar system some 3½ to four billion years ago. These primordial objects probably retain more of their original structure, unlike the planets themselves, whose formation involved drastic changes over some 100 million years — a blink of an eye in astronomical terms. “I’m completely focused now on the remnants of the planetary formation process.”
He’s not alone. The recent discovery of extrasolar planets — about 300 have been found orbiting distant stars — has sparked interest in planetary formation among astronomers worldwide. In Victoria, Kavelaars is working with Gladman and two other scientists as the co-ordinator of the Canada France Ecliptic Plane Survey. That’s part of an international project using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Mauna Kea to discover and track objects in the outer solar system.
That sounds exotic — until Kavelaars explains that the last time he actually visited Hawaii was in 2003. That’s when the group developed a system that allows them to send observing instructions to the telescope and receive electronic data back. Housed in a huge computer, that information is now as close as his laptop. That’s how all of Canada’s astronomers work today, he says. Admittedly, computers and electronic communication have taken some of the romance out of skywatching, he adds, but the system makes for more economical science than his previous monthly flights across the Pacific.
“I got to know the beaches of Hawaii reasonably well, but it’s not an efficient way of doing things,” says Kavelaars, who is an adjunct physics and astronomy professor at McMaster and the University of Victoria.
Chasing celestial objects was hardly what he had in mind when he arrived at Guelph in 1984. Sure, he’d grown up staring up at the night sky on the family farm southwest of London, Ont., but his plan was to study agriculture and return to the farm. About a month into his first semester, he realized he’d made a mistake. By semester two, he was enrolled in physics. Recently he broached the subject of that earlier career switch with his dad, who still runs the farm.
“I felt like I had really disappointed my family,” says Kavelaars, the only son among three children. (His sisters have carved out their own high-profile careers away from the farm: Ingrid Kavelaars is an actress and Monique Kavelaars competed in fencing in the 2004 Olympics.) What did his dad say? “He said it surprised him when I said I wanted to be a farmer. It didn’t seem to fit with my interests.”
Working with Guelph physicists such as Ross Hallett and Jim Stevens, now both retired, showed Kavelaars what being a scientist was like. He laughs as he recalls another not-so-subtle hint near the end of his undergraduate studies, when he was pondering his next move. One day, he opened his locker and out fell a cosmology textbook, clunking him on the head. A subsequent talk on cosmology by a visiting Queen’s researcher led him to apply for graduate studies in Kingston.
Now in Victoria, Kavelaars, 42 — “I’m currently looking for the answer to life, the universe and everything” — is looking to the Kuiper Belt in more ways than one. Along with another Guelph physics grad, he is pushing the Canadian Space Agency to fund the development of a suitcase-sized microsatellite that would more precisely survey the outer solar system. Positioned in low-Earth orbit, that satellite could be used to map objects in the Kuiper Belt and even out to the Oort Cloud, believed to be the source of long-period comets at the edge of the solar system. Alan Scott, B.Sc. ’91, is a program scientist helping to make hardware for satellites at COM DEV Canada in Ottawa. He’s currently involved in building a guidance sensor for the James Webb Space Telescope. Due for launch in 2013, that infrared telescope will look for planetary systems forming around other stars.
For their proposed microsatellite, Scott and Kavelaars have completed a concept study and now hope to begin developing a satellite. The last time they worked together was in student government at U of G in the late 1980s.
“I think it’s got a good chance,” says Scott of their proposed microsatellite, likely to cost about $22 million. (He’s also kept a hand in at Guelph, working with Prof. Mike Dixon, Environmental Biology, on advanced life-support systems for future space missions.)
Beyond planets and other space rocks, Kavelaars says he’s as interested as any other astronomer in the big questions about the universe. What’s dark energy, for instance, that hypothetical stuff believed to be speeding up the expansion of the universe? And is there life somewhere else out there? He’s betting there is, perhaps as close as microbes on Mars or as far as one of those exoplanets. “One thing you learn in science is to expect the unexpected.”
Take those irregular bodies circling the outer planets. “We looked for moons around Uranus on a whim as much as anything. Others said there were none to be found. We looked and found a couple in the late ’90s. Hundreds of them have been found since.”
Kavelaars finds these questions resonate with the “inner explorer” in other people, not just scientists but also school groups and even his daughters.
“I’ve met very few people who, after a conversation, aren’t excited to learn more. I think it’s the mystery of the world around us, how it works. How have planets formed? Why are there trees? Why is the sky blue? These are questions that intrigue you and inspire you.”
That curiosity is apparently ageless. He recalls a talk he gave to a group of retirees. Afterward, they had lots of questions. Someone asked whether we’ll ever reach another planet. Someone else wanted to know about extraterrestrial spacecraft possibly making the reverse trip.
Kavelaars takes such questions in stride. “The reason we get so swept up in UFO sightings is not because people really think it happens but because of an innate desire that it would happen.”
