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. This page gives a short introduction to what I do.

Astronomy Research

• Publications of my research, and a current CV.

• I work with the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) survey for extrasolar planets. My students and I use the Peter van de Kamp Observatory here at Swarthmore to search for transits (small eclipses) that occur when planets pass in front of their host stars. These transits not only reveal that a planet orbits that star, but the depth of the eclipse allows us to determine the planet's radius. Here's a story about the first two planets discovered by the survey.

  I wrote Tapir, some software to help plan astronomical observations, in support of this project and have released the source code to the community.

• 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 (old) project related to this topic is observations of disks around T Tauri, an unusual young binary system. Though much of my work in this area is now over 10 years old, the next few years promise some exciting new results; my collaborators and I have been granted observing time with ALMA, a new array of millimeter telescope in Chile, to make much more sensitive observations of these disks than we were able to in the past.

• 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.

• 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 or Moodle as the course web page for courses I'm teaching.  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. Here's the -->

• 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: Thu Dec 13 11:47:11 EST 2012

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