Julio Ángel Fernández | |
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 Julio Ángel Fernández in 2008. | |
| Born | Julio Ángel Fernández Alves (1946-04-05)5 April 1946 (age 79) |
| Alma mater | Universidad de la República |
| Occupation(s) | astronomer, teacher |
Julio Ángel Fernández Alves (born 5 April 1946)[1] is aUruguayan astronomer and teacher, member of the department of astronomy at theUniversidad de la República inMontevideo.[2] He is also a member of PEDECIBA, (the program for development of basic sciences in Uruguay),[3] and the Uruguayan Society of Astronomy.[4] From 2005 to 2010, he was the Dean of the Universidad de la Republica's Faculty of Sciences.[5] The asteroid5996 Julioangel, discovered in 1983, was named after him.[6]
He is an active researcher of the Researchers National System of Uruguay.[7]
Fernandez is member of theNational Academy of Sciences of the United States.[8][9][10]
In 1980, in his paperOn the existence of a comet belt beyond Neptune, Fernández proposed thatperiodic comets arrived too frequently into the inner Solar System to be accounted for solely by having arrived from theOort cloud, and that a trans-Neptunian belt of comets at around 50 AU would be required to explain them.[11] Subsequent computer models by Martin Duncan,Tom Quinn andScott Tremaine in Canada supported the view, and led eventually to the discovery of theKuiper belt.[12]David Jewitt, who discovered the belt, believes that Fernández deserves more credit than anyone else, includingGerard Kuiper, for predicting its existence.[13] He has subsequently published many papers on thetrans-Neptunian population.[14]
In 2006, Fernández was one of a number of dissenters at theIAU'smeeting to establish the first definition of "planet." As an alternative to the IAU's draft proposal, which had includedPluto, its moonCharon andCeres among the planets, Fernández with his Uruguayan colleagueGonzalo Tancredi proposed a definition where they reserved the term "planet" only for those objects in theSolar System which hadcleared their neighbourhoods ofplanetesimals, describing those objects which had not cleared their orbits yet retained a spherical shape as "planetoids."[15] The IAU's final definition incorporated much of Fernández and Tancredi's proposal, though the objects were christened "dwarf planets."[16]The event originated the word "Plutoed," which was selected as the "word of the year 2006" by theAmerican Dialect Society.[17]
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)Fernandez, Julio A. (2005).1st edition. Springer.ISBN 978-1-4020-3490-9; hbk{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)[18]| International | |
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