Konstantin Batygin

California Institute of Technology

Research field

Planetary dynamics, the outer solar system

Konstantin Batygin studies how planetary orbits evolve under gravity. In 2016 he and Michael Brown showed that the six Kuiper belt objects with the largest orbits known at the time all point the same way, and that a planet of about ten Earth masses far beyond Neptune could keep them aligned. The planet has not been observed and the clustering is still debated. The unit presents the work as a case of Kepler's and Newton's laws applied to real orbits.

In the masterclass

The spotlight closes Section 6, where the third law and the vis-viva equation give the periods and speeds of the distant orbits that the paper analyzes.

The research is presented in Unit 2: The Sky and Celestial Mechanics, in a research spotlight box that explains the result at the level of the unit and links it to the physics you have just learned.

The paper

Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System