Hi! I am Yugo. I am a second-year PhD student at the University of Tokyo and a JSPS research fellow (DC2) studying the migration of exoplanets, especially hot Jupiters.
My work combines photometric observations with population-level statistical analysis to understand planetary migration and tidal interactions.
I grew up in Japan, but also spent time in Singapore during secondary school and university. I speak Japanese, English, and a bit of Singlish.
Outside of research, I enjoy exploring Japan with my motorcycle, watching baseball games, and playing music. I used to play in a band called the huckleberries. You can find us on Spotify .
Some hot Jupiters orbit too close to the host star that migration alone cannot explain their current location. I monitor the transit timings of these hot Jupiters to look for signs of orbital decay driven by tidal interactions. To do this, I am also building a custom pipeline to reduce photometric data for the MuSCAT instrument.
On the other hand, we also expect some hot Jupiters to orbit too far from their hosts that migration due to damping of large eccentricity (high-eccentricity migration) is implausible. I study the efficiency of tidal circularization to identify hot Jupiters that instead likey arrived via disk migration. These "disk migration hot Jupiters" show interesting trends.
Many hot Jupiters are discovered on misaligned orbits, meaning that their orbital axis is tiled relative to the stellar spin axis. By analyzing the effect of gravity darkening in TESS light curve, I found that hot Jupiter KELT-19Ab likely has not just retrograde but a flipped orbit. Such extreme misalignment is very rare, and may require primoridal misalignment in the disk phase.
I'm a lifelong baseball fan and love catching games at the Tokyo Dome. Student discount is my best friend.
On weekends I take my bike out for rides around Japan. Mt. Fuji is my go-to spot.
I also love playing the guitar, ukulele and the piano. When I'm overseas, I like visiting local music stores to find unique instruments.