Sarah Sadavoy

Star and Planet Formation Studies

My research investigates the earliest stages of star and planet formation. In particular, I study how stars are born, how they accumulate their mass, how they form disks of dust and gas around them, how those disks will eventually produce planets, and the origins of life. This research uses telescopes from all over the world in the infrared, (sub)millimeter, and radio bands to observe star-forming regions, young protostars, and their disks in dust continuum, spectral line emission, and polarimetry observations. I primarily use observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique (IRAM) 30 m telescope in Spain, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, the Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico, the Northern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA) in France, and the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) in California, as well as observations from space-based telescopes such as the Spitzer Space Telescope and Herschel Space Observatory.