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
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, Astronomy
External Links
Recent Publications
Chen, C. Y., Friesen, R., Li, J., Schmiedeke, A., Frayer, D., Li, Z. Y., Tobin, J., Looney, L. W., Offner, S., Mundy, L. G., Harris, A. I., Church, S., Ostriker, E. C., Pineda, J. E., Hsieh, T. H., & Lam, K. H. (2024). Dynamics in Star-forming Cores (DiSCo): project overview and the first look towards the B1 and NGC 1333 regions in Perseus. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 527(4), 10279-10293. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad3868
Guerra-Alvarado, O. M., van der Marel, N., Di Francesco, J., Looney, L. W., Tobin, J. J., Cox, E. G., Sheehan, P. D., Wilner, D. J., Macías, E., & Carrasco-González, C. (2024). IRAS4A1: Multiwavelength continuum analysis of a very flared Class 0 disk. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 681, Article A82. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202347685
Lin, Z.-Y. D., Li, Z.-Y., Stephens, I. W., Fernández-López, M., Carrasco-González, C., Chandler, C. J., Pasetto, A., Looney, L. W., Yang, H., Harrison, R. E., Sadavoy, S. I., Henning, T., Hughes, A. M., Kataoka, A., Kwon, W., Muto, T., & Segura-Cox, D. (2024). Panchromatic (Sub)millimeter polarization observations of HL Tau unveil aligned scattering grains. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 528(1), 843-862. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae040
Reynolds, N. K., Tobin, J. J., Sheehan, P. D., Sadavoy, S. I., Looney, L. W., Kratter, K. M., Li, Z. Y., Segura-Cox, D. M., & Kaib, N. A. (2024). The Disk Orientations of Perseus Protostellar Multiples at ∼8 au Resolution. Astrophysical Journal, 963(2), Article 164. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad151d
Takakuwa, S., Saigo, K., Kido, M., Ohashi, N., Tobin, J. J., Jørgensen, J. K., Aikawa, Y., Aso, Y., Gavino, S., Han, I., Koch, P. M., Kwon, W., Lee, C. W., Lee, J. E., Li, Z. Y., Lin, Z. Y. D., Looney, L. W., Mori, S., Sai, J., ... Yen, H. W. (2024). Early Planet Formation in Embedded Disks (eDisk). XIV. Flared Dust Distribution and Viscous Accretion Heating of the Disk around R CrA IRS 7B-a. Astrophysical Journal, 964(1), Article 24. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad1f57