Judah, you shall pass (your doctorate)!

Judah just completed his thesis focused on understanding the connection between close-in small planets and distant giants. Judah led the ambitious ‘Distant Giants Survey’ which collected over 4000 observations of ~50 stars between 2020 and 2024 to search for distant companions in an unbiased way. Even more remarkably, Judah completed much of these observations during Covid-19 disruptions when we astronomers had to develop new ways of taking data on the fly. Along the way, he developed new tools to search for distant giants including a public Python package called ethraid (named as an homage to his beloved Lord of the Rings). Judah found a dozen planets and brown-dwarfs in this sample and showed that distant giant planets are likely correlated with the presence of close-in small planets. Some of Judah's null results are fascinating too. He showed that host-star metallicity cannot explain this correlation and that some other aspect of planet formation (e.g. disk lifetime) must collaborate to produce the distant giants. In the fall, Judah will begin a postdoc at UCSB and one of his projects will be to explore the connection between inner/outer regions of planetary systems with greater statistical power.