Konstantin Batygin | |
|---|---|
 Konstantin Batygin in 2022 | |
| Born | Konstantin Yuryevich Batygin (1986-03-23)23 March 1986 (age 39) |
| Education | University of California, Santa Cruz,California Institute of Technology |
| Known for | Planet Nine |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Planetary astronomy |
| Website | web |
Konstantin Batygin (Russian:Константи́н Юрьевич Батыгин) is an Americanastronomer and Professor of Planetary Sciences atCaltech.[1][2]
Konstantin Batygin was born inMoscow,Soviet Union.[3] His father, Yuri Konstantinovich Batygin, worked as anaccelerator physicist in theMoscow Engineering Physics Institute until 1994, when he moved along with his wife Galina[4] and their family toWakō,Japan, and began working at the particle accelerator facility inRIKEN.[3] There, Konstantin graduated from a public Japanese elementary school, later attending a Russian embassy-based school and studying the martial artGōjū-ryū.[3]
In late 1999, at age 13,[5] Konstantin Batygin moved toMorgan Hill, California,[6] along with his family. He chose to attend theUniversity of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) for the beach and the chance to keep playing in his rock band, The Seventh Season.[3][7] During his sophomore year as an undergraduate, he metGregory P. Laughlin, and afterwards they began working together on the Solar System’s long-term dynamical evolution.[3] In June 2008, he graduated with aB.S. degree in Astrophysics,[6] winning the Loren Steck Award for his thesis, "The Dynamical Stability of the Solar System".[4] Batygin subsequently obtained aPh.D. degree in Planetary Science in 2012 fromCalifornia Institute of Technology.
Konstantin Batygin is deeply engaged in the exploration of complex systems, and his interest ranges from the solar system to location intelligence to finance and music. He has been involved in several projects as a faculty member atCaltech and as the Co-Founder and Head of Technology atLucinetic, an artificial intelligence company. As a chaos theory specialist, he is fascinated by artificial intelligence and creating commercial insights from disparate data. His band,The Seventh Season, where he plays lead guitar and sings, has performed hundreds of shows all over the US.
Batygin's research is primarily aimed at understanding the formation and evolution of planetary systems. In 2010, he andDavid J. Stevenson published a calculation,[8] which showed thathot Jupiters can become inflated as a consequence of Ohmic dissipation of electrical currents induced through an interaction between ionized atmospheric winds and the planetary magnetic field. In 2012, Batygin demonstrated that misalignments between stellar spin-axes and planetary orbits can arise from gravitational perturbations exerted onto protoplanetary disks by primordialcompanions stars.[9] In 2015, Batygin andLaughlin hypothesized that the Solar System once possessed a population of short-period planets that were destroyed by Jupiter'smigration through thesolar nebula.[10] In January 2016, Batygin andMichael E. Brown proposed the existence of aninth planet in theSolar System.[7] In 2018, Batygin showed that the evolution of astrophysical disks can be modeled with theSchrödinger equation, a fundamental equation in quantum mechanics.[11] He has appeared as himself in multiple television documentaries including theNOVA 2019 miniseriesThe Planets.[12]
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