Lang Cui

For six straight years, the radio telescope at Effelsberg recorded the "breathing" of the distant blazar 1156+295 — a galaxy whose core shoots out a jet of plasma at nearly the speed of light. Every few months, its radio waves flared up and then faded.

The black hole in GRS 1915+105 behaves like a lighthouse with a shaky foundation: its jet, normally aimed in one direction, suddenly veered off by 34 degrees in just a month. Astronomers spotted this during a radio burst in 2025. It turns out that since 2023, the "beam" had been wandering within a 70-degree range, but the abrupt jump in 37 days set a record.

The cosmic racer SS 433 tears through the Galaxy, ejecting two narrow jets of superheated gas at a quarter of the speed of light. This is a microquasar — a binary system where a black hole siphons matter from a normal star, and some of it escapes as jets.

The orchestra plays without a conductor. Each instrument follows its own schedule: the violin on Monday, the flute on Wednesday, the timpani on Saturday. Astronomers hear not music but isolated notes scattered across the calendar. A telescope sees a star only when it is above the horizon and when the schedule has allotted time for it.