Welcome to Amy Mioduszewski's Home Page

This page is under construction, please bear with me. Last edit April 23, 2009.

Associate Scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). I am part of the AIPS group. If you have a question or comment about AIPS please e-mail the designated AIP.

My present favorite image: 1.5 GHz VLBA image of SS433.

This is one of the last frames in the SS433 Movie. Click here to download a gzipped mpeg, avi, fast mpeg or high resolution gif version of the movie.

Mailing Address:
NRAO
P.O. Box O
Socorro, NM 87801
USA

Tel: (+1) 505-835-7263

Fax: (+1) 505-835-7027

E-mail address: amiodusz@nrao.edu

AIPS Stuff

Installing/updating AIPS on NRAO Laptops

VLA calibrator models at frequecies below Q-band

A little history

Education
As an undergraduate I attended Lawrence Technological University , a small engineering university in Southfield Michigan, where I majored in physics. After receiving my undergraduate degree in 1991, I went to the University of Michigan , where I was a graduate student in the astronomy department. I received my Ph.D. in 1996, with the acceptance of my thesis Observations and Simulations of Parsec Scale Jets in AGN . My thesis adviser was Hugh Aller .

Postdoctoral positions
For my first postdoc I was the JIVE support scientist at the VLBA correlator. Which means I worked for the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe, but I worked at the NRAO in Socorro. I was in the space VLBI group and was responsible for the space VLBI experiments that involved only the space telescope ( HALCA ) and ground radio telescopes in Europe. During this postdoc I got involved with the search for radio counterparts to X-ray binaries with Bob Hjellming and Michael Rupen both at NRAO. My area of interest is high resolution imaging (i.e. VLBI observations) of these objects, which are also known as "microquasars".

My second postdoc was at the Research Centre for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Sydney . I worked with Lewis Ball (now at the Parkes radio telescope) and Vikram Dwarkadas (now at the University of Chicago ) on estimating the radio emission from hydrodynamic simulations of supernovae. The strength of this approach is that it is not limited by the assumption of self-similarity that is required by the classic analytical approach.

Scientific Interests

My main interest is imaging the radio counterparts to X-ray binaries, otherwise known as microquasars. X-ray binaries are close binary systems of stars where one member of the binary is a compact object, i.e., a black hole or neutron star. Material from the "normal" star falls into the compact object. This material heats up to high temperature and emits X-rays, thus the name X-ray binary. X-ray binaries were the first good evidence of the existence of black holes. The radio emission from these objects is almost always from a relativistic jet (a jet of material that is ejected at speeds close to the speed of light), this is similar to quasars on a much smaller scale, thus radio emitting X-ray binaries are frequently called microquasars (even though there is real evidence for jets in only a few sources that have been imaged with sufficient resolution). Along with my collaborators Michael Rupen and Vivek Dhawan, we use the VLA to monitor known miscroquasars and search for new radio counterparts when there has been an X-ray nova. If the sources are bright enough we use the VLBA to image these objects, frequently encountering relativistic jets.

Publications on ADS

Click here to download a gzipped postscript preprint of "Simulated Radio Images and Light Curves of Young Supernovae" Mioduszewski, Dwarkadas and Ball, accepted for publication in ApJ.

Cyg X-3 poster from 2002 HEAD meeting .

Non-astronomical Interests (photos to come)