Konstantin Batygin

Batygin says he was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1986, moved with his family to Japan in 1994 and to the United States in 1999, in the middle of eighth grade, later attending high school in San Jose, California.⁠[1]

He writes that in 1994 the family moved to Wako near Tokyo, where his physicist father worked at the RIKEN accelerator facility; he attended a local public school and then a Russian embassy-based school.⁠[2]

He recalls that his childhood friend Dmitry’s father once took them to Tokyo Disneyland; only in graduate school did he realize this was Nikolai Shakura, the astrophysicist behind the standard theory of disk accretion.⁠[3]

He says that in high school he realized he was good at physics and math, and that he has played in the same band since starting it in late high school.⁠[1]

He recalls being admitted to the University of California, Santa Cruz, as an engineering major; on registration day a stranger suggested he study astrophysics, and he went to the physics department and changed his major.⁠[4]

In April 2008 he and Gregory Laughlin posted a paper describing a 20-billion-year numerical integration of the sun and eight planets that found unstable solutions such as Mercury colliding with Venus in about 862 million years; it was accepted by the Astrophysical Journal.⁠[5]

He was then about to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics, having started the project with Laughlin’s help; the French researcher Jacques Laskar reached the same conclusions by another method and published two weeks earlier.⁠[6]

He recalls receiving an email from Mike Brown congratulating him on admission to Caltech and at first assuming it was another Mike Brown; after a single day on campus he decided to enroll.⁠[4]

He received an M.S. (2010) and a PhD (2012) in planetary science from Caltech, advised by David J. Stevenson and Michael E. BrownBrown UniversityBrown University is a private nonprofit research university in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Chartered by Rhode Island's colonial legislature in 1764, it is known for its undergraduate Open Curriculum, which has no common required core. Christina H. Paxson, president since July 2012, announced on August 3, 2026, that the 2026–27 academic year would be her last in office. As of October 1, 2026, the search for Brown's 20th president remained underway.Open the full entry.⁠[7]

As a graduate student he worked with Alessandro Morbidelli, an Italian planetary scientist at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France.⁠[8]

He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur from July to November 2012 and a Harvard ITC postdoctoral fellow at the HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from November 2012 to June 2014.⁠[7]

In 2014 he returned to Caltech’s Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, working on the formation and evolution of the solar system, chaos, the dynamical evolution of exoplanets and physical processes in planetary interiors and atmospheres.⁠[9]

In 2015 he was named to the Forbes “30 Under 30” science list, which called him “the next physics rock star”; he had published 21 first-author papers by the age of 28 and was lead singer of the band The Seventh Season.⁠[3]

On January 20, 2016, Caltech announced that Batygin and Mike Brown had published work in the Astronomical Journal inferring, through mathematical modeling and computer simulations, a giant planet of about 10 Earth masses with an orbital period of 10,000 to 20,000 years in the outer solar system, nicknamed Planet Nine but not yet observed directly.⁠[10]

Batygin said: “For the first time in over 150 years, there is solid evidence that the solar system’s planetary census is incomplete.”⁠[10]

The work rested on the clustering of perihelia and orbital planes of six Kuiper Belt objects with semi-major axes above 250 AU, at a combined significance of 3.8σ; the simulations also predicted small bodies on orbits perpendicular to the planetary plane, and such objects had already been observed.⁠[11]

The proposal set off a worldwide search; Batygin also praised the Soviet scientist Mikhail Lidov, who in the 1950s calculated the effect now known as the Lidov-Kozai mechanism.⁠[8]

In September 2016 Popular Science named Batygin, then assistant professor of planetary science at Caltech, one of its 2016 Brilliant 10.⁠[12]

In college he saw astrophysics as a plan B in case his band did not become the next Metallica; he says a good theory should “solve multiple problems for the price of one.”⁠[13]

In 2017, as assistant professor and Van Nuys Page Scholar, he was named a Packard Fellow in Science and Engineering by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, receiving $875,000 over five years, which he said would mainly fund supercomputer time.⁠[14]

In February 2018 the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded him a 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship, alongside Caltech colleagues Jim Fuller and David Simmons-Duffin, each award carrying $65,000.⁠[15]

In February 2019 he, Fred C. Adams, Michael E. Brown and Juliette C. Becker published the 92-page review The Planet Nine Hypothesis in Physics Reports, estimating the planet at 5–10 Earth masses, with a semi-major axis of 400–800 AU, an inclination of 15–25 degrees and an eccentricity of 0.2–0.5.⁠[16]

Caltech’s faculty bio lists him as assistant professor from 2014 to 2019, Van Nuys Page Scholar from 2017 to 2019 and professor from 2019, and lists English, Japanese and Russian as his languages.⁠[17]

On May 18, 2020, he and Alessandro Morbidelli proposed in the Astrophysical Journal that millimeter-sized icy grains in the circum-Jovian disk gather where inward drag and outward entrainment cancel, then collapse into satellitesimals that form the moons one at a time; he said the idea came on a run when he saw wind holding a bottle on a slope.⁠[18]

On July 19, 2021, he appeared on episode 201 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing an overview of the solar system, the Oort Cloud, simulating planet formation, evidence for and the search for Planet Nine, Oumuamua and commercial spaceflight.⁠[19]

On January 12, 2023, he and Morbidelli published a new theory in Nature Astronomy aiming to explain both the solar system’s terrestrial planets and the origin of exoplanetary super-Earths, including why super-Earths within one system tend to be similar in size.⁠[20]

In April 2024 he, Morbidelli, Brown and David Nesvorny posted a paper using N-body simulations that include the Galactic tide and passing stars to study long-period, nearly planar, Neptune-crossing TNOs, finding them consistent with a PlanetPlanet LabsPlanet Labs (brand name Planet) is a San Francisco-based Earth observation satellite company founded in 2010 by three NASA scientists; it designs, builds and operates a constellation of imaging satellites and provides daily imagery data and analysis of Earth. The company is a public benefit corporation listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker PL.Open the full entry 9 model and rejecting the Planet 9-free scenario at about 5σ.⁠[21]

On May 17 and 18, 2024, the Caltech orchestra performed a work by Miami Symphony conductor Eduardo Marturet inspired by the Planet Nine hypothesis, with Batygin playing a guitar solo; the two met in 2017 after both received awards from the Genius 100 Foundation.⁠[22]

In May 2025 he and Fred C. Adams of the University of MichiganUniversity of MichiganThe University of Michigan is a university founded in Detroit in 1817 that moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1837; it is governed by a statewide-elected Board of Regents and also has campuses in Dearborn and Flint.Open the full entry published a study in Nature Astronomy concluding, from the orbital tilts of the moons Amalthea and Thebe, that about 3.8 million years after the solar system’s first solids formed, Jupiter had roughly twice its present radius and a magnetic field about 50 times stronger.⁠[23]

He writes that he met his wife on the day he arrived in the United States and that they have a daughter and a son; outside science he enjoys fight training, running, making music, skateboarding and surfing.⁠[2]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.konstantinbatygin.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

X: Public account: https://x.com/kbatygin (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

California Institute of Technology: Official website: https://www.caltech.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[9]