Jean-Luc Margot

Jean-Luc Margot (born 1969) is a Belgian-born astronomer and a UCLA professor who specializes in planetary sciences. He has discovered and studied several binary asteroids with radar and optical telescopes. He obtained the first images of binary near-Earth asteroids and described formation of the binary by a spin-up process. Margot and his research group have studied the influence of sunlight on the orbits and spins of asteroids, the Yarkovsky and YORP effects. Margot determined that Mercury has a molten core from the analysis of small variations in the spin rate of the planet.