Studying the Physics of Low-Mass Star Formation with CARMA ( Demerese SALTER, University of Maryland)

Last year the University of Maryland at College Park (UMD) and the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (PUC) signed an agreement to promote collaboration and the exchange of expertise between the two universities. As a joint UMD and PUC postdoc, in an effort to facilitate this inter-university connection, I will be spending time at both institutes and moving to Santiago for one year beginning in late February 2012. My visit to PUC this week, and this talk, is intended to introduce the PUC community to the research ongoing in Maryland, with particular emphasis on millimeter observations using the CARMA interferometer (for which UMD is an invested partner), and how this instrument is preparing us for ALMA science. I will also be giving an overview of my own research interests in low-mass star formation, covering how we can study the physical and chemical structure of protoplanetary disks around T Tauri stars, probe the physical structure of the inner outflow caity walls in younger embedded sources, and map the large-scale interactions of outflows from young stellar objects on their natal environment. I will also spend some time to present our discoery of a special binary T Tauri star that exhibits periodic outbursts at millimeter wavelengths, which we have attributed to synchrotron emission from star-star magnetic interactions. This particular source is allowing us to derive constraints on the strengths of pre-main-sequence stellar magnetospheres and the time-dependent release of magnetic energy during an interaction. My goal in this talk is to cover a little bit of several diverse projects in order to initiate science discussions and to start a dialog between UMD and PUC research goals.