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
Cox, E. G., Novak, G., Sadavoy, S. I., Looney, L. W., Lee, D., Berthoud, M., Bourke, T. L., Coudé, S., Encalada, F., Fissel, L. M., Harrison, R., Houde, M., Li, Z. Y., Myers, P. C., Pattle, K., Santos, F. P., Stephens, I. W., Wang, H., & Wolf, S. (2022). The Twisted Magnetic Field of the Protobinary L483. Astrophysical Journal, 932(1), [34]. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ac722a
Michel, A., Sadavoy, S. I., Sheehan, P. D., Looney, L. W., & Cox, E. G. (2022). A Millimeter-multiwavelength Continuum Study of VLA 1623 West. Astrophysical Journal, 937(2), [104]. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ac905c
Sheehan, P. D., Tobin, J. J., Li, Z. Y., van ’t Hoff, M. L. R., Jørgensen, J. K., Kwon, W., Looney, L. W., Ohashi, N., Takakuwa, S., Williams, J. P., Aso, Y., Gavino, S., Gregorio-Monsalvo, I. D., Han, I., Lee, C. W., Plunkett, A., Sharma, R., Aikawa, Y., Lai, S. P., ... Yen, H. W. (2022). A VLA View of the Flared, Asymmetric Disk around the Class 0 Protostar L1527 IRS. Astrophysical Journal, 934(2), [95]. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ac7a3b
Sheehan, P. D., Tobin, J. J., Looney, L. W., & Megeath, S. T. (2022). The VLA/ALMA Nascent Disk and Multiplicity (VANDAM) Survey of Orion Protostars. VI. Insights from Radiative Transfer Modeling. Astrophysical Journal, 929(1), [76]. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ac574d
Stephens, I. W., Myers, P. C., Zucker, C., Jackson, J. M., Andersson, B. G., Smith, R., Soam, A., Battersby, C., Sanhueza, P., Hogge, T., Smith, H. A., Novak, G., Sadavoy, S., Pillai, T. G. S., Li, Z. Y., Looney, L. W., Sugitani, K., Coudé, S., Guzmán, A., ... Encalada, F. (2022). The Magnetic Field in the Milky Way Filamentary Bone G47. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 926(1), [L6]. https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ac4d8f
