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I am a PhD Candidate in Astronomy at the Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. I did my undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. My research focus is to study Gravitational Instabilities in protoplanetary disks using 3D numerical hydrodynamical simulations.

Entries by Karna Desai

Planetary migration and the architecture of planetary systems

Posted October 16, 2018 by Karna Desai

Planets are formed in “protoplanetary disks” composed of gas and dust orbiting a central star. Once a planet has formed in the disk, the radius of its orbit can change due to gravitational forces between the planet and material in the disk. In this way, planets can migrate from their original location, a phenomenon that… Read more »

The universe full of exoplanets

Posted March 13, 2018 by Karna Desai

Our understanding of the formation of planetary systems has historically been based on the observations about our own Solar System. A planet is a roughly spherical object orbiting a star that has sufficiently strong gravity to clear its orbital path of other debris. The four terrestrial planets (Earth, Venus, Mercury, and Mars) of our Solar… Read more »

The need of our times: Support for fundamental science research

Posted March 14, 2017 by Karna Desai

If you are an undergraduate student, you probably share some attributes with other readers of this blog. You are likely a millennial, meaning that you may not remember the fall of the Berlin wall, and to you, the space race is a distant past. Federal funding for “fundamental” or “basic” science research was at the all-time… Read more »

Early evolution of protoplanetary disks

Posted August 26, 2016 by Karna Desai

Anyone growing up in the 1990s or earlier would recollect that our solar system had nine planets, but did you ever wonder if planets exist outside the solar system? Planets found outside of our solar system are called extrasolar planets or exoplanets. Approximately 5,600 exoplanet candidates have been discovered since 1993, and nearly 2,000 exoplanets have… Read more »

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