Dr Hayley Bignall
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Room: 610.158
Phone: 61 8 9266 9245
Email: H.Bignall@curtin.edu.au
Biography
Hayley Bignall is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Curtin Institute for Radio Astronomy (CIRA). She has been at Curtin since March 2008, and is responsible for Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) data processing operations at CIRA.
Hayley obtained her PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Adelaide in 2003, for a thesis entitled "Radio Variability and Interstellar Scintillation of Blazars". She then spent 5 years employed in the Netherlands as a Support Scientist at the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe, supporting the data processor and operations of the European VLBI Network.
Research interests
Hayley’s main research interests are in techniques of radio interferometry, and studies of active galactic nuclei, especially studies of variability and interstellar scattering of blazars. These compact, extragalactic radio sources, beamed jets of active galactic nuclei, show variations in their emission across the whole electromagnetic spectrum. Observations of multiwavelength variability help to constrain the emission mechanisms and physical properties of the region around the supermassive black hole central engine. In addition to source-intrinsic variability, a large fraction of these sources exhibit rapid variability at centimetre wavelengths as their radio emission is scattered by electron density fluctuations in the interstellar medium (ISM) of our Galaxy. This interstellar scintillation (ISS) provides a unique probe of very small-scale structure in both the ionized ISM, and the compact jets of the radio sources themselves. The effective resolution is two orders of magnitude higher than achievable even with VLBI.
