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, mechanically aligned dust grains, 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, JWST, and VLA observations to peer into stellar nurseries.
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)
Rachel Harrison (2022)
Frankie Encalada (2024)
Courses Taught
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, Astronomy
Professor, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
External Links
Recent Publications
Huang, B., Girart, J. M., Stephens, I. W., Myers, P. C., Zhang, Q., Cortes, P., Sánchez-Monge, Á., Fernández López, M., Le Gouellec, V. J. M., Megeath, T., Murillo, N. M., Carpenter, J. M., Li, Z. Y., Liu, J., Looney, L. W., Sadavoy, S., Karnath, N., & Kwon, W. (2025). Characterizing Magnetic Properties of Young Protostars in Orion. Astrophysical Journal, 984(1), Article 29. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/adc30b
Huang, B., Girart, J. M., Stephens, I. W., Fernández López, M., Myers, P. C., Zhang, Q., Tobin, J. J., Cortes, P., Murillo, N. M., Sadavoy, S., Arce, H. G., Carpenter, J. M., Kwon, W., Le Gouellec, V. J. M., Li, Z. Y., Looney, L. W., Megeath, T., Cox, E. G., Karnath, N., & Segura-Cox, D. (2025). The Protostars in Orion: Characterizing the Properties of Their Magnetized Envelopes. Astrophysical Journal, 981(1), Article 30. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad9ea4
Kido, M., Yen, H. W., Sai, J., Takakuwa, S., Ohashi, N., Aikawa, Y., Aso, Y., Flores, C., Han, I., Koch, P. M., Kwon, W., Lee, J. E., Li, Z. Y., Looney, L. W., Narang, M., Saigo, K., Sharma, R., Thieme, T. J., Tomida, K., & Williams, J. P. (2025). Early Planet Formation in Embedded Disks (eDisk). XXI. Limited Role of Streamers in Mass Supply to the Disk in the Class 0 Protostar IRAS 16544-1604. Astrophysical Journal, 985(2), Article 166. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/adc72a
Kovačić, I., Barnes, A. T., Bigiel, F., De Looze, I., Madden, S. C., Herrera-Camus, R., Krabbe, A., Baes, M., Beck, A., Bolatto, A. D., Bryant, A., Colditz, S., Fischer, C., Geis, N., Iserlohe, C., Klein, R., Leroy, A., Looney, L. W., Poglitsch, A., ... Nersesian, A. (2025). Full disc [C II] mapping of nearby star-forming galaxies: SOFIA FIFI/LS observations of NGC 3627, NGC 4321, and NGC 6946. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 694, Article A87. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202450062
Looney, L. W., Lin, Z. Y. D., Li, Z. Y., Tobin, J. J., Radecki, M., Butte, S., Stephens, I. W., Fernández-López, M., Yang, H., Reynolds, N. K., Sheehan, P., Kwon, W., Harrison, R., & North, A. (2025). L1448 IRS3B: Dust Polarization Aligned with Spiral Features, Tracing Gas Flows. Astrophysical Journal, 985(2), Article 148. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/adcb9f