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

I'm an associate 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.

• 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.

• 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

I also teach 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).

I teach 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).

In the past, I have taught (among other things):

• 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, which I hope to put on line at some point. 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.

Other interests and projects

• Here's a simple script to plot Gaussian and Poisson distributions with the same mean, to see how they converge as the mean increases. This is one example of the Central Limit Theorem.

• Resources for academic couples. This page includes links to academic institutions that have policies on how to deal with couples in the hiring process, and people's personal experiences with such situations. 

• I've written BloodPlot, a program for the Macintosh that lets people with diabetes (like me) download blood glucose data from their meters to their Macs. Note: this is completely out of date, but here for historical reference.  The good news is that Mac users can now run Windows applications, allowing them to run the various software packages (which are, almost without exception, Windows only) to interact with blood glucose meters, continuous glucose monitors, and insulin pumps.

• Why is this computer called "hven"?

Last modified: Thu Oct 15 14:52:04 EDT 2009 ; 38696 hits since September 3, 1998