Rob Fender

The black hole in the binary system V4641 Sagittarii behaves like a giant blender. It sucks in matter from its companion star and flings it back into space in two narrow jets. These jets slam into the surrounding gas like a water jet hitting sand, gradually carving out a huge cavity around the hole.

In the 2010s, astronomers noticed something remarkable: supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, despite vast differences in size and brightness, fall onto a single straight line when you plot their millimeter emission against X-ray emission and mass.

At night, invisible bullets streak across the sky — cosmic rays. These are atomic nuclei accelerated to near-light speeds. The Galaxy's magnetic fields tangle their paths, making it hard to pinpoint where they were born.

In the neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, lives the binary system A0538-66. There, a neutron star — a tiny sphere the size of a city but heavier than the Sun — spins on its axis every 69 milliseconds.

Supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies sometimes eject narrow streams of matter — jets that travel at nearly the speed of light. For a long time, astronomers could not say precisely how fast these jets are for different black holes.

A black hole paired with a star works like a pump: it pulls gas from its companion, swirls it into a glowing disk, and occasionally ejects some of that matter in two narrow jets. In 2021, the system 4U 1543-475 put on such a show.