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
External Links
Recent Publications
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
Brunken, N. G. C., Rocha, W. R. M., Van Dishoeck, E. F., Gutermuth, R., Tyagi, H., Slavicinska, K., Nazari, P., Megeath, S. T., Evans, N. J., Narang, M., Manoj, P., Rubinstein, A. E., Watson, D. M., Looney, L. W., Linnartz, H., Caratti O Garatti, A., Beuther, H., Linz, H., Klaassen, P., ... Yang, Y. L. (2024). JWST observations of 13CO2ice: Tracing the chemical environment and thermal history of ices in protostellar envelopes. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 685, Article A27. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202348718
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
Encalada, F. J., Looney, L. W., Takakuwa, S., Tobin, J. J., Ohashi, N., Jørgensen, J. K., Li, Z. Y., Aikawa, Y., Aso, Y., Koch, P. M., Kwon, W., Lai, S. P., Lee, C. W., Lin, Z. Y. D., Santamaría-Miranda, A., de Gregorio-Monsalvo, I., Phuong, N. T., Plunkett, A., Sai, J., ... Han, I. (2024). Early Planet Formation in Embedded Disks (eDisk). XIII. Aligned Disks with Nonsettled Dust around the Newly Resolved Class 0 Protobinary R CrA IRAS 32. Astrophysical Journal, 966(1), Article 32. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad3442
Encalada, F. J., Looney, L. W., Novak, G., Sadavoy, S., Cox, E. G., Pereira-Santos, F., Lee, D., Harrison, R., & Pattle, K. (2024). Magnetic Fields Observed along the East-West Outflow of IRAS 16293-2422. Astrophysical Journal, 968(2), Article 101. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad4968