Konstantin Batygin

Konstantin Batygin is a Russian-American astronomer and Associate Professor of Planetary Sciences at Caltech. He is on the 2015 Forbes list of 30 scientists under 30 who are changing the world, and has been named one of the "brilliant 10" people of 2016 by Popular Science magazine.

Konstantin Batygin's research is primarily aimed at understanding the formation and evolution of planetary systems. In 2010, Konstantin Batygin 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, Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown proposed the existence of a ninth planet in the Solar System. In 2018, Batygin showed that the evolution of astrophysical disks can be modeled with the Schrödinger equation, a fundamental equation in quantum mechanics.