In the binary system Cygnus X-3, right here in our Galaxy, a black hole and a giant star whirl so tightly together that the star loses matter: it's swept away by a powerful wind. Jets blast out from near the black hole; recently, a telescope caught photons from them, each carrying the energy of a flying mosquito.
Here’s how they’re born: helium nuclei get accelerated in the jet, then fly outward and crash into the light and particles of the stellar wind. These collisions spawn particles that instantly transform into photons of record-shattering energy.
as written by the authors arXiv:2603.27805
We study the physical mechanisms underlying the production of orbitally-modulated PeV photons from Cyg X-3, recently discovered by the LHAASO collaboration. Our key findings are as follows. Helium nuclei are accelerated in a compact and strongly magnetized region within the jet, but they then quickly advect downstream to regions with a weaker field, allowing them to diffuse out of the jet, where they produce pions in hadronic collisions with both the stellar photons and the stellar wind of the Wolf-Rayet donor. The optical depths across the binary are $$\lesssim$$1 for both types of interactions, implying that their rates are proportional to the column densities along the particle paths. Given the low viewing angle of Cyg X-3 ($$i\approx26^\circ$$--$$28^\circ$$), most of the observed photons are produced by the relativistic hadrons accelerated in the counterjet (for which the column densities toward the observer are much longer than for the jet). This also explains the peak of the phase-folded PeV photon flux to be on the opposite side of the superior conjunction than that for the (also orbitally-modulated) GeV photons, which are produced by collisions of relativistic electrons with stellar photons in the optically thick regime. This then implies that the GeV emission is produced in the approaching jet.
One such photon carries a hundred times more energy than a flying mosquito, and it's all packed into a particle of light.