Konstantin Batygin () is an American
astronomer and Professor of Planetary Sciences at
Caltech.
Early life
Konstantin Batygin was born in
Moscow
Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...
,
Soviet Union
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
.
His father, Yuri Konstantinovich Batygin, worked as an
accelerator physicist in the
Moscow Engineering Physics Institute until 1994, when he moved along with his wife Galina
and their family to
Wakō,
Japan
Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...
, and began working at the particle accelerator facility in
RIKEN.
[ There, Konstantin graduated from a public Japanese elementary school, later attending a Russian embassy-based school and studying the martial art Gōjū-ryū.][
In late 1999, at age 13,][ In June 2008, he graduated with a B.S. degree in Astrophysics,][ winning the Loren Steck Award for his thesis, "The Dynamical Stability of the Solar System".][ Batygin subsequently obtained a Ph.D. degree in Planetary Science in 2012 from California Institute of Technology.
]
Career
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 at Caltech and as the Co-Founder and Head of Technology at Lucinetic, 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 and David J. Stevenson published a calculation, which showed that hot 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 primordial companions stars. In 2015, Batygin and Laughlin hypothesized that the Solar System once possessed a population of short-period planets that were destroyed by Jupiter's migration through the solar nebula. In January 2016, Batygin and Michael E. Brown proposed the existence of a ninth planet in the Solar System
The Solar SystemCapitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Sola ...
.[ In 2018, Batygin showed that the evolution of astrophysical disks can be modeled with the Schrödinger equation, a fundamental equation in quantum mechanics. He has appeared as himself in multiple television documentaries including the NOVA 2019 miniseries '' The Planets''.]
See also
* List of astronomers
References
External links
*
Curriculum Vitae, caltech.edu
{{DEFAULTSORT:Batygin, Konstantin
1986 births
Living people
21st-century American astronomers
California Institute of Technology alumni
California Institute of Technology faculty
Russian emigrants to the United States
University of California, Santa Cruz alumni
American planetary scientists