Extreme particle acceleration in the microquasar CygnusX-3
Abstract
Super-massive black holes in active galaxies can accelerate particles to relativistic energies, producing jets with associated γ-ray emission. Galactic ‘microquasars’, which are binary systems consisting of a neutron star or stellar-mass black hole accreting gas from a companion star, also produce relativistic jets, generally together with radio flares. Apart from an isolated event detected in CygnusX-1, there has hitherto been no systematic evidence for the acceleration of particles to gigaelectronvolt or higher energies in a microquasar, with the consequence that we are as yet unsure about the mechanism of jet energization. Here we report four γ-ray flares with energies above 100MeV from the microquasar CygnusX-3 (an exceptional X-ray binary that sporadically produces radio jets). There is a clear pattern of temporal correlations between the γ-ray flares and transitional spectral states of the radio-frequency and X-ray emission. Particle acceleration occurred a few days before radio-jet ejections for two of the four flares, meaning that the process of jet formation implies the production of very energetic particles. In CygnusX-3, particle energies during the flares can be thousands of times higher than during quiescent states.
- Publication:
-
Nature
- Pub Date:
- December 2009
- DOI:
- 10.1038/nature08578
- arXiv:
- arXiv:0910.5344
- Bibcode:
- 2009Natur.462..620T
- Keywords:
-
- Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena;
- Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 29 pages (including Supplementary Information), 8 figures, 2 tables version submitted to Nature on August 7, 2009 (accepted version available at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/nature08578.pdf)