BRIAN M.

PATTEN


Astronomer
Harvard-Smithsonian CfA


Education

B.S. in Physics, 1986, Iowa State University
M.S. in Astrophysics, 1989, Iowa State University
Ph.D. in Astronomy, 1995, University of Hawaii

 Contact Information

I am currently on a rotation as a Program Director in the Division of Astronomical Sciences at the National Science Foundation. Please contact me there as I no longer have a phone number or an office at the CfA (my e-mail still works though!).

National Science Foundation
Division of Astronomical Sciences
4201 Wilson Blvd
Arlington, VA 22230
(703) 292-4910
bpatten@cfa.harvard.edu
bpatten@nsf.gov

 About

I am currently on an Intergovernmental Personnel Act rotation as the Program Director for Education and Special Program as well as Program Director for Galactic Astronomy in the Division of Astronomical Sciences at the National Science Foundation. While I am at the NSF, I am still, technically, an employee of the Smithsonian Institution.

I have been an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics since 1998. While I am directly employed by the Smithsonian Institution's Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), I also have an appointment as an Associate of the Harvard College Observatory. My primary duties are to provide support and conduct science programs as a member of the Spitzer Space Telescope IRAC instrument team and (from 1998 - 2006) to provide support for the SWAS mission.

For SWAS (the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite), I provided mission operations and data analysis support for the mission at SAO. I still act as the archive scientist now that the mission has been completed, preparing and distributing SWAS archival data products for the mission to the public access sites. I also maintain the the SWAS WWW site at SAO.

For the Spitzer Space Telescope I carried out several In-Orbit Checkout and Science Verification tasks for the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC), an SAO project, following the Spitzer launch. I also act as the scientific lead for several Spitzer Guaranteed Time Observer science programs.



Research Interests

My primary research interests are in very low mass stars and brown dwarfs and in gravitational microlensing. Brown dwarfs are objects of sub-stellar mass made of highly compressed hydrogen and helium (and a trace of other elements). These objects are not massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion reactions in their cores and thus are not considered stars, though they do glow from the heat of their formation. Brown dwarfs may represent a kind of transition object between stars and what we think of as planets and can probably tell us a great deal about formation and fundamental nature of both. For gravitational microlensing, I am interested specifically in determining the nature of the lenses in the bone fide microlensing events seen towards the Large Magellanic Cloud during the MACHO survey. The lenses can tell us a great deal about the nature of the stucture of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, as well as providing us with a probe of the contents of our galaxy's halo.

I am also interested in the evolution of coronal X-ray emission levels and rotation rates of young, low-mass stars, similar to our own Sun. How these stars evolve both on the main sequence and in the pre-main sequence phase of evolution tells us about the evolution of magnetic dynamos in these kinds of stars and something about the past history of our own star, the Sun.

Publications

The easiest way to look at my publications is to make use of the NASA ADS Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstract Service.

Learn more about ...

  • The National Science Foundation

  • Harvard University

  • The Smithsonian Institution

  • The SWAS Mission

  • The Spitzer Space Telescope

  • The Infrared Array Camera on Spitzer

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