Microquasars emerge as the Milky Way’s most extreme particle engines

3 hours ago7 min read2 comments

The cosmos has just revealed another of its magnificent secrets, and it’s a game-changer. The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO), a state-of-the-art detector nestled high in the mountains, has fundamentally rewritten our understanding of the Milky Way's most energetic engines.For decades, astronomers have been hunting for the sources of the universe's most powerful particles, and now, they've found them in microquasars. These systems are not the supermassive behemoths at the centers of galaxies but are comparatively smaller, stellar-mass black holes locked in a violent dance with a companion star, voraciously siphoning off its material.This process creates incredibly powerful jets that blast out into space, and LHAASO's precise measurements have now confirmed that these jets are the most potent particle accelerators in our entire galaxy, producing protons and gamma rays with energies reaching the petaelectronvolt (PeV) scale—that's a million times more energetic than the protons smashed in the Large Hadron Collider. This discovery shatters long-held expectations.The conventional wisdom suggested that only cataclysmic events like supernova remnants could generate such staggering energies, but here we have a binary system within our own galactic neighborhood doing it with breathtaking efficiency. It’s like discovering a local workshop that can somehow produce engines more powerful than those built in the world's largest industrial plants.This finding finally provides a tangible, observable source for the mysterious 'knee' structure in the cosmic-ray energy spectrum—a long-observed dip or bend that physicists have theorized points to the upper energy limit of galactic cosmic-ray sources. We can now tie that theoretical structure directly to the ferocious, jet-driven mechanics of these microquasars.Imagine it as finally identifying the specific factories responsible for a particular type of high-grade industrial product found across a continent; it brings a new level of clarity to the cosmic map. This revelation suggests our galaxy is teeming with multiple, distinct sources of these ultra-high-energy particles, painting a far more complex and dynamic picture of the high-energy universe than we previously imagined.It opens up a thrilling new chapter in astrophysics, forcing us to reconsider the fundamental processes that shape our galaxy and accelerate matter to near the speed of light. The implications are profound, not just for understanding the origin of cosmic rays, but for probing the extreme physics at work in the immediate vicinity of black holes, where gravity and magnetic fields conspire to launch matter across light-years with unimaginable force.

#featured

#microquasars

#LHAASO

#PeV particles

#gamma rays

#cosmic rays

#black hole jets

#Milky Way

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