Honors ＆ Experience

• Academia Sinica Postdoctoral Fellow
• BIMA Fellow
• Dr. and Mrs. James C. Y. Soong Fellow

Research Interests

My current research interests focus mainly on how high-mass stars form in dense molecular cloud cores and what their impacts to the environment.  Throughout their lifetime, massive stars have profound impacts to the evolution of the visible Universe.  Young massive stars reflect the conditions of their natal cloud cores; on the other hand, the feedbacks of star-forming activities affect the cloud evolution.  Unlike their low-mass counterparts, the formation mechanism and the evolutionary sequence of young massive stars have not yet reached a .  Because of their clustering nature and their large distances, only observations with high angular resolutions can reveal the characteristics of massive protostars.

Using the Submillimeter array (SMA) and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, we can “see” through a large amount of material and probe the physical and chemical properties of massive star-forming regions with sufficiently good angular resolutions to resolve individual protostellar objects in clusters. This allows us to investigate their physical and chemical conditions such as stabilities and evolutionary stages.  Our studies also care about the evolution of cloud-scale structures through their near- or mid-infrared observations.   

Selected Publications

• H.-R. Chen, R. Rao, D. J. Wilner, & S.-Y. Liu, “The Magnetized Environment of the W3(H2O) Protostars,” ApJL, 751, L13 (2012)
• Y.-N. Su, S.-Y. Liu, H.-R. Chen, & Y.-W. Tang, “The Extremely High-Velocity Outflow from the Luminous Young Stellar Object G5.89−0.39,” ApJL, 744, L26 (2012)
• H.-R. Chen, S.-Y. Liu, Y.-N. Su, & M.-Y. Wang, “Deuterium Fractionation as an Evolutionary Probe of Massive Proto-stellar/cluster Cores,” ApJ, 743, 196 (2011)
• Y. C. Minh, S.-Y. Liu, H.-R. Chen, & Y.-N. Su, “H₂CS in Outflows of the Massive Star-Forming Core DR21(OH),” ApJL, 737, L25 (2011)
• H.-R. Chen, S.-Y. Liu, Y.-N. Su, & Q. Zhang, “Deuterium Fractionation as an Evolutionary Probe in the Infrared Dark Cloud G28.34+0.06,” ApJL, 713, L50 (2010)
• K. Qiu, Q. Zhang, J. Wu, & H.-R. Chen, “Submillimeter Array Observations of the Molecular Outflow in High-mass Star-forming Region G240.31+0.07,” ApJ, 696, 66 (2009)
• H.-R. Chen, Y.-N. Su, S.-Y. Liu, T. R. Hunter, D. J. Wilner, Q. Zhang, J. Lim, P. T. P. Ho, N. Ohashi, & N. Hirano, “654 GHz Continuum and C¹⁸O (6-5) Observations of G240.31+0.07 with the Submillimeter Array,” ApJL, 654, L87 (2007)
• H.-R. Chen, W. J. Welch, D. J. Wilner, & E. C. Sutton, “A High-mass Protobinary System in the Hot Core W3(H₂O),” ApJ, 639, 975 (2006)
• more....