Studying the interaction between microquasar jets and their environments

TL;DR

This study uses 2D simulations to analyze how jets in high-mass microquasars interact with stellar winds, revealing shock formation, jet disruption conditions, and potential sites for particle acceleration up to TeV energies.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed numerical analysis of jet-wind interactions in high-mass microquasars, highlighting shock effects and particle acceleration mechanisms.

Findings

Jets with power <10^{36} erg/s may be destroyed by wind interactions.

Strong shocks can accelerate particles to TeV energies.

Jet bending and shocks influence jet stability and emission processes.

Abstract

In high-mass microquasars (HMMQ), strong interactions between jets and stellar winds at binary system scales could occur. In order to explore this possibility, we have performed numerical 2-dimensional simulations of jets crossing the dense stellar material to study how the jet will be affected by these interactions. We find that the jet head generates strong shocks in the wind. These shocks reduce the jet advance speed, and compress and heat up jet and wind material. In addition, strong recollimation shocks can occur where pressure balance between the jet side and the surrounding medium is reached. All this, altogether with jet bending, could lead to the destruction of jets with power $<10^{36} \rm{erg/s}$. The conditions around the outflow shocks would be convenient for accelerating particles up to $\sim $TeV energies. These accelerated particles could emit via synchrotron and inverse Compton (IC) scattering if they were leptons, and via hadronic processes in case they were hadrons.