Radio Astronomy is definitely undergoing it's kind of a second birth. It's the
same objects but different physical
processes that we can detect with radio.
I'm Anna Kapinska. I
am an assistant scientist and astronomer at
NRAO in Socorro. I work at the VLA 
user support group where I help our
community, astronomer community, to use
the VLA and I also work, of course, with
the VLA itself. How did I get interested
in astronomy? I have to blame my father
for that who always was very keen
on keeping us, myself and my
brother, interested in maths and
astronomy and it just kind of sparked
the right spark and it just was a
natural thing for me to continue into
science. I did my undergrad in Poland and
I actually did it in astronomy. After
that I went to the Netherlands, the
University of Amsterdam, and I did
masters in astronomy and astrophysics. I
did my PhD in the UK at the University of
Southampton on cosmological evolution of
supermassive black holes in the center of
galaxies and my first postdoc was also
at the University of Portsmouth but
after that I went to ICRAR at the
University of Western Australia to work
on the the local radio telescopes over
there, and that was my last stop before I
arrived at NRAO last year. I've
done a lot of radio astronomy and I
started off working on the extra binary
systems in radio waves. So basically that would
be the stellar black holes with the -- or
neutron stars, predominantly black holes--
and their jets. Normally you do some
optical astronomy as the standard to
get introduced into how to do research,
but once I started doing research
projects, my own research projects, they
were all radio astronomy. The whole radio
astronomy is changing right now, we have
so many new telescopes coming up but
NRAO is, I think it's a very fascinating
place. Very rich in
the knowledge and the
experience. I do use VLA to observe
jets. You have the particles being
injected close to the vicinity of the
black hole and then as they are, with
a really massive angular momentum,
they start spiraling in magnetic fields
away from the black hole. They radiate at
the energies exactly what you can see in the radio waves, and so when you
when we use the VLA to look
at those jets, that's exactly what
you see. You see those electrons
and, depending on which frequency you're looking
at, it will be higher or lower so you may
see kind of younger, fresher electrons
being expelled, or the older ones that
have been hanging out there for a bit
longer. You can use that information and
that observations and images that you
get from the radio observations to
understand how the jets propagate and
how they interact with the ambient
medium.
Here, within NRAO, we're definitely going to continue 
with the NGVLA, which is a
Next-Generation VLA. This is something that
is going to come in the next, what is it
today, 2019? 15 years hopefully, 10 or 15
years. I hope to observe something
in the 2030s.
The thing is that back in Poland we really haven't had,
I didn't see a problem with that. Then I got
involved in outreach, but it's more
sort of outreach for kids, for
pupils of 10 or 12 years old, and I found
that extremely valuable and interesting. And we would target, as well, young girls
to show them that, yes, you can be an
astronomer, and I do notice that
especially smaller, younger kids would
comment and be surprised and amazed that
well, you can be a female astronomer. I
am a science team member of one of the
online international citizen science
projects. It's Radio Galaxy Zoo but it's a spinoff
from a hugely successful previous project on
the Galaxy Zoo. I find it extremely
interesting and valuable thing to do.
Some of our users for that particular
project just enjoy looking at the
objects and help us doing
science. Others are really, really
interested. We have a number of users
that ended up writing papers with us,
and I did actually publish a paper a
year and a half ago where the second author
was one of our citizen scientists
just because he's done so much work on
the project that we decided that he
definitely deserves to be
co-author on a paper. There are plans of
using the new surveys that are coming up
in the next year's radio surveys
to take it further because
it's very, very successful and our users
seem to really love it.
Hi, everybody I'm Matthew. 
And I'm Victoria. Thank you so
much for watching our final Women of
Discovery video. Be sure to like and
subscribe so you don't miss our live
session next week where we'll talk about
the making of the video.
You can ask questions below 
in the comments or you
can join us live and ask questions
during the chat. Thanks for joining us.
