Eric L. N. Jensen Astronomy Research and Teaching
		T Tau in the infrared	T Tau in visible light
		Why so different?

I'm a professor in, and chair of, the Physics and Astronomy Department at Swarthmore College. My research interest, broadly speaking, is astrobiology, the study of the origin and distribution of life in the cosmos. More specifically, the piece of that puzzle that I'm currently working on is trying to understand the formation of planets around other stars through observations of young stars whose ages (1-100 million years) suggest that they may be in the process of forming planets. This page gives a short introduction to what I do.

Astronomy Research

• Publications of my research, and a current CV. (By far the most up-to-date way to see my publications is through this custom link to NASA's ADS abstract service.) .

• Young, nearby stars. In the last few years, astronomers have discovered a number of relatively young (only about 10 million years old!) stars that are quite nearby (only about 150 light years). These stars are difficult to find because they are not associated with large clouds of gas and dust, as is common for younger stars. These stars are of interest because their proximity to Earth and their youth make them good targets for observing planet formation, and possibly for imaging the planets themselves. My students and I have been working on a survey to search for such stars in the southern sky.

• I also study protoplanetary disks around young binary stars. I'm interested in planet formation in binary systems, and whether such planets would be habitable. Since more than half of all stars are members of binary systems, understanding how often planets form in binaries is important for understanding the frequency of planet formation in the universe and the likelihood of life outside our solar system.

  One project related to this topic is observations of disks around T Tauri, an unusual young binary system.

• I'm interested in life beyond Earth, and along with my colleague Amy Cheng Vollmer, Professor of Biology, I've given some talks about some basic astrobiology concepts. Here's a lecture we gave on this topic. Amy will also be teaching an astrobiology class in Spring 2011 as part of Swarthmore's Lifelong Learning program.

• Want to get an idea of what life as a research astronomer is like? Here's a travelogue of an observing trip I took to the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii in September 1998.

Astronomy Teaching

Increasingly, I've been using Blackboard as the course web page for courses I'm teaching (though recently I've been testing out Moodle).  One downside of that is the difficulty of linking to those courses so that people other than the students can see what I'm doing.  Below are links to a few course pages that should be accessible (though in some cases they link to more recent iterations of the courses, taught by other people).

• Along with the physicists in our department, I co-teach Physics/Astronomy 5, Spacetime, Quanta, and Cosmology, an intro-level but non-survey course covering special relativity, cosmology, and quantum mechanics.

• Astronomy 121, Research Techniques in Observational Astronomy (a junior/senior level seminar on practical aspects of doing astronomy research, including on-line resources, coordinate systems, detectors, data analysis, and observing in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum).

• Astronomy 128, Galaxies and Galactic Structure, a junior/senior level seminar on the structure of our own and other galaxies, and the interactions between galaxies. (If the site asks you to log in, just choose "Login as a guest."

• Astronomy 16, Modern Astrophysics, a calculus-based introductory astrophysics course for prospective astronomy and astrophysics majors or minors (and anyone else who is interested in astronomy and has a little physics and calculus under his/her belt!).
• Astronomy 1, Introduction to Astronomy, a general survey of astronomy.
• I have written a number of new labs for these courses. E-mail me if you're interested in trying them out with your students; they are introductory undergraduate level labs, some of which use small telescopes and some of which just involve naked-eye observations.

Comments or suggestions to Eric Jensen,

Last modified: Sun Feb 19 16:23:55 EST 2012