Mysterious black hole jets may be the source of powerful cosmic rays
Observations of the microquasar SS 433 provide clues to how these small black holes accelerate electrons to produce high-energy jets
By Alex Wilkins
25 January 2024
Artist’s impression of the SS 433 system, depicting the large-scale jets (blue) and the surrounding Manatee Nebula (red)
Science Communication Lab for MPIK/H.E.S.S
Now, Laura Olivera-Nieto at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, and her colleagues have observed the jets’ gamma radiation using the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) telescopes in Namibia. They discovered that the jets’ high-energy structure changes over short distances, which suggests that the radiation is produced by electrons slamming into some kind of barrier and being accelerated.