Las Campanas Belles
Description: Samuel Yee's webpage.
I’m currently a final year graduate student in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University, working with Josh Winn . I plan to defend my PhD in August 2023 and will begin as a 51 Pegasi b Fellow at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in September 2023.
My research interests are in understanding Hot Jupiters – giant planets like Jupiter in our own solar system, but which orbit much closer to their stars, taking just a few days to make a complete orbit. In comparison, Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun in our solar system, takes 88 days to go around once. So these planets are among the hottest worlds in the universe! These extreme planets have many peculiarities, with many having “inflated radii” – appearing larger than we would expect from their masses
Hot Jupiters were the first kind of exoplanet to be found, with the discovery of 51 Peg b (for which the discoverers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019 ). They came as a surprise to most astronomers, as it was thought that no planet could form so close to its star. More than two decades later, how exactly these planets came to be remains a mystery. It’s likely that they formed further out and migrated inward, but we would like to understand how exactly they did so.
Las Campanas Belles