Yayaati Chachan

About me

To describe my love for astronomy,
I will resort to a few words by Vera Rubin:
"I became an astronomer because I could not imagine living on Earth and not trying to understand how the Universe works."

I am a third year graduate student in planetary science at Caltech. I have had the privilege of pursuing my long held childhood interest in astronomy and planetary science for the last three years. I grew up in Delhi and finished high school in Singapore on a SIA Youth Scholarship. I then moved to the U.K. to do my undergraduate study at the University of Cambridge, where I finished my bachelors in physics and masters in astronomy.

Research Interests

I have a broad interest in planets and discs, which is reflected by the breadth of my projects. Some of the questions I am interested in include:

How do planets form in protoplanetary discs?
What are planetary atmospheres made of and how do they interact with planetary interiors?
Can planet formation in binary star systems give us important clues?
What methods can be employed to determine the key observables of exoplanets?
Finally, how should we synthesise our knowledge of the solar system and of exoplanetary systems to develop a unifying framework?

It is my goal to use observational, analytical, and numerical methods in my attempts to answer these questions. For more details, please take a look at the projects I am involved in.

Current and Past Projects

C.V.

Education

PhD, California Institute of Technology, 2017-
Advisors: Heather Knutson and Dave Stevenson
M. Sci, Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, 2016-17
Advisors: Cathie Clarke, Amaury Triaud, Richard Booth
B. A., Natural Sciences (Physics), University of Cambridge, 2013-16

Recipient of: Institute of Astronomy Prize, Dirac Prize,
Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Scholarship,
SIA Youth Scholarship

Publications

1. Chachan, Y. & Stevenson, D. J. 2018, On the Role of Dissolved Gases in the Atmosphere Retention of Low-Mass Low-Density Planets, ApJ, 854, 21, arXiv:1802.04296
2. Zhang, M., Chachan, Y., Kempton, E. M.-R., & Knutson, H. A. 2019, Forward modelling and retrievals with PLATON, a fast open source tool, PASP, 131, 034501, arXiv:1811.11761
3. Chachan, Y. & Stevenson, D. J. 2019, A linear approximation for the effect of cylindrical differential rotation on gravitational moments: Application to the non-unique interpretation of Saturn's gravity, Icarus, 323, 87, arXiv:1902.10728
4. Chachan, Y., Booth, R. A., Triaud, A. H. M. J., & Clarke, C. 2018, Dust accretion in binary systems: Implications for planets and transition discs, MNRAS, 489, 3896, arXiv:1908.11377, astrobites
5. Chachan, Y., Knutson, H., Gao, P., Kataria, T., et al., 2019, A Hubble PanCET Study of HAT-P-11b: A Cloudy Neptune with a Low Atmospheric Metallicity (AJ, accepted), arXiv:1910.07523

ADS Full C.V.