A Little About Me
I am a fourth year graduate student at The University of Minnesota Astronomy Department, and my main interests are Cosmology and Extragalactic astrophysics. I work mainly as a radio astronomer, using powerful telescopes such as the Very Large Array, the Greenbank Telescope, and the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope array.
Last Updated: (October 27th, 2008).
Recent Research Highlights:
Bolton Fellowship at ATNF
I have recently had the honor of accepting the Bolton Fellowship at the Australia Telescope National Facility in Sydney. This is a radio-specific postdoctoral fellowship, and I begin work in September (but I need to finish my dissertation first!). More updates to come…
WSRT Proposal Accepted
We have just been awarded 78 hrs on the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) to conduct Rotation Measure Synthesis observations of the Coma/A1367 supercluster and Abell 150. The Coma/A1367 observations will be a 4-pointing mosaic that will complement our GBT polarization mapping with higher resolution and added rotation measure information.
Our GBT Super-Cluster Mapping Begins
We were recently awarded 80 hrs on the Green Bank Telescope to map the polarized synchrotron emission around three super-clusters of galaxies: Coma/A1367, Abell 576, and Abell 907. The observations are now well underway, and the hard part of reducing and calibrating the data is about to begin! Here is a pdf version of our GBT Proposal. Here are some notes on our GBT L-band polarization observations and a collection of our raw scans; this is all proprietary stuff, but if you can make sense of it you're probably a collaborator anyway!
Giant Void in the Universe
We recently reported a discovery of a ~280 Mpc void in the direction of the famous WMAP "Cold Spot". Look here for a site describing the largest void ever discovered. This project was a collaboration with Professors Lawrence Rudnick and Liliya Williams, and received a fair amount of press. It combines cosmology and radio astronomy, two of my favorite things to work on.
More to come soon!
A Good Time for Radio Astronomy!
Right now the field of radio astronomy is experiencing a period of rapid growth. New radio telescopes are being designed and built all around the world, and there has never been a better time to be a graduate student working in the radio regime. Many existing radio facilities, such as the VLA, VLBA, WSRT, GBT, GMRT, DRAO, Arecibo, ATCA, Parks, Effelsberg, EVN, MERLIN, and the SMA (just to name a few), are still producing important results across many fields of astrophysics. Even more exciting is the impressive list of new major projects planned for the coming decade. Here is a short list (a few are almost operational now):
Contact Information
The University of MinnesotaOffice: Physics 475a
Phone: 612-626-1819
E-Mail: brown@physics.umn.edu
Advisor: Professor Larry Rudnick
