Contact Information
1002 W. Green St.
Urbana, IL 61801
Research Description
My group studies the cutest stars - big and cuddly protostars only 10,000 to 100,000 years old, before they turn punky and begin to fuse hydrogen into helium in their core in about 1 million years. These stars are surrounded by envelopes of dust and gas that give us direct evidence of how stars form and how early planetary systems are going to form. Lately, we have been most excited about 1) how circumstellar disks evolve from the earliest stages and what impact the disk has on the evolution of planets via dust grain growth, and 2) the polarization of light from the circumstellar disk which arises from three mechanisms, aligned dust grains via magnetic field, aligned dust grains from radiation, and/or scattering.
The sources we study are usually deeply embedded in gas and dust, which means that they can only be observed at wavelengths longer than 10 microns. Thus, our group typically utilizes ALMA, SOFIA, and VLA observations to peer into stellar nurseries.
However, lately I am also considering variability of sources in LSST.
Current Graduate Students:
Past Graduate Students:
Shiya Wang (2008)
Yu-Shao "Jerry" Shiao (2008)
Woojin Kwon (2009)
Jonathan Seale (2010)
Hsin-Fang Chiang (2011)
I-Jen "Katherine" Lee (2013)
Ian Stephens (2013)
Dominique Segura-Cox (2017)
Erin Cox (2018)
Courses Taught
External Links
Recent Publications
Bigiel, F., de Looze, I., Krabbe, A., Cormier, D., Barnes, A. T., Fischer, C., Bolatto, A. D., Bryant, A., Colditz, S., Geis, N., Herrera-Camus, R., Iserlohe, C., Klein, R., Leroy, A. K., Linz, H., Looney, L. W., Madden, S. C., Poglitsch, A., Stutzki, J., & Vacca, W. D. (2020). SOFIA/FIFI-LS Full-disk [C II] Mapping and CO-dark Molecular Gas across the Nearby Spiral Galaxy NGC 6946. Astrophysical Journal, 903(1), [30]. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/abb677
Jones, T. J., Kim, J. A., Dowell, C. D., Morris, M. R., Pineda, J. L., Benford, D. J., Berthoud, M., Chuss, D. T., Dale, D. A., Fissel, L. M., Goldsmith, P. F., Hamilton, R. T., Hanany, S., Harper, D. A., Henning, T. K., Lazarian, A., Looney, L. W., Michail, J. M., Novak, G., ... Zweibel, E. G. (2020). HAWC+ Far-infrared Observations of the Magnetic Field Geometry in M51 and NGC 891. Astronomical Journal, 160(4), [167]. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/abada8
Lin, Z. Y. D., Li, Z. Y., Yang, H., Looney, L., Stephens, I., & Hull, C. L. H. (2020). Validating scattering-induced (sub)millimetre disc polarization through the spectral index, wavelength-dependent polarization pattern, and polarization spectrum: The case of HD 163296. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 496(1), 169-181. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staa1499
Lopez-Rodriguez, E., Dowell, C. D., Jones, T. J., Harper, D. A., Berthoud, M., Chuss, D., Dale, D. A., Guerra, J. A., Hamilton, R. T., Looney, L. W., Michail, J. M., Nikutta, R., Novak, G., Santos, F. P., Sheth, K., Siah, J., Staguhn, J., Stephens, I. W., Tassis, K., ... Zweibel, E. G. (2020). SOFIA/HAWC+ Traces the Magnetic Fields in NGC 1068. Astrophysical Journal, 888(2), [66]. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ab5849
Segura-Cox, D. M., Schmiedeke, A., Pineda, J. E., Stephens, I. W., Fernández-López, M., Looney, L. W., Caselli, P., Li, Z. Y., Mundy, L. G., Kwon, W., & Harris, R. J. (2020). Four annular structures in a protostellar disk less than 500,000 years old. Nature, 586(7828), 228-231. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2779-6
