relativistic jet formation

The blue glow in water around a nuclear reactor is light born when a charged particle outruns light in that medium. The effect was discovered by Pavel Cherenkov in 1934, with the theory provided by Igor Tamm and Ilya Frank.

The James Webb Space Telescope peered into an era when the universe was less than a billion years old and spotted strange objects—'little red dots.' These are black holes with masses of millions of suns, but in very compact, chemically pristine galaxies. Standard scenarios can't grow such heavyweights that early.

For years, silence reigned in the heart of galaxy 1ES 1927+654: the accreting gas merely whispered in X-rays, leaking slow winds. But in 2022–2025, the picture changed dramatically. Spectra taken by XMM-Newton and Swift lit up with emission lines — a narrow peak at 0.56 keV, likely from OVII oxygen, a broader feature near 1 keV, and a powerful iron band in the 6–7 keV region.

When JWST peered into the young universe at redshifts of 6–10, it revealed a scattering of mysterious 'little red dots' (LRDs). These objects combined features of galaxies and active nuclei, but their spectra refused to fit into familiar patterns.

Two neutron stars, ultra-dense remnants of massive stars, merge into one, and the space around them shudders: a gravitational wave is born, a ripple in the very fabric of spacetime. Almost simultaneously, a narrow stream of matter, the jet, erupts from the scene.

The James Webb Space Telescope JWST has peered into the heart of supernova remnant SNR 0540-69.3 — what remains after a massive star died in a neighboring galaxy. Inside, amid the flying debris, astronomers saw a clear pattern: glowing clumps and voids arranged in a symmetric design.

Imagine a spotlight: if you look at it from the side, it glows dim red, but if you stare straight into it, it blinds you with white-blue light. That, according to new data, is exactly what the mysterious 'little red dots' in the early universe look like. They are giant black holes, objects with gravity so strong that even light cannot escape, turned edge-on to us.

A field sown with seeds. Some seeds are large and sprout at the slightest rain; others are finicky, requiring special soil and rare conditions. Which seeds fall into the ground determines what kind of forest will grow years later. Astrophysicists think about the birth of black holes in the early universe in much the same way.

When the James Webb Space Telescope turned its gaze deep into time, astronomers expected to see familiar galaxies. Instead, the images were dotted with a scattering of bright, incredibly compact red dots.

The James Webb space telescope peered into an era when the Universe was less than a billion years old and discovered hundreds of strange objects there. Tiny yet dazzlingly bright, they glowed a deep red — like burning coals scattered across the black velvet of space.

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted astonishing objects in the depths of space — tiny red dots that shine so brightly it's as if a spotlight were hidden inside a small bulb. These dots are not stars or galaxies in the usual sense, but rather 'cocoons' around supermassive black holes greedily gulping down surrounding gas.

A flashlight doesn't cast a uniform circle of light; it has a bright spot in the center and a blurred halo at the edges. If you switch it off quickly, the edges are the last to fade, and by how the light dies, you can guess the shape of the reflector.

The plasma jet from the center of a distant galaxy is like a river that flows from its source and gradually becomes clear. Near the black hole, the flow is dense and opaque to radio waves, like muddy water.

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.

A rod stuck into a granular material (say, sand or a layer of small beads) behaves quite differently from what you might expect. Instead of going straight down, it quickly tilts away from the vertical and ends up lying flat. That's what researchers found when they dropped rigid and flexible rods into a two-dimensional layer of foam beads and tracked their motion with a high-speed camera.

In a gas cloud left after a star exploded (called a supernova remnant), astronomers noticed a giant glowing letter S. It was drawn by two jets of superheated material ejected during the cataclysm. These jets didn't just shoot straight out — they slowly spun like a top, which bent their path into curves.

When two lead nuclei collide at tremendous speed, a cloud of scorching matter is born for an instant — denser and hotter than the center of the Sun. Through this cloud fly jets of particles: narrow, laser-like beams knocked out by the impact. The CMS detector captures their tracks and shows how the jets change as they fight through the hot 'fog'.

When a massive star dies and explodes, it releases not only light but also invisible lightweight particles. They fly out in all directions at nearly the speed of light. Only a small fraction reaches Earth, but each explosion sends its own clump. These clumps stretch along the way: fast particles overtake slow ones, and by the time they arrive, a clump can be spread over tens of thousands of years.

The binary system SS433 is known for its black hole stripping matter from a neighboring star. Some of the gas falls into the hole, while the rest is ejected in two narrow jets that wobble like a spinning top. These jets are visible in radio and X-rays.

A drop falls into a glass, and a tiny jet, a thin fountain, shoots up from the surface for an instant. Something similar happens with a bubble stuck to the wall of a tube when you yank the tube downward. Water around the bubble rushes in, and a jet fires from its top. The speed of this jet depends on the bubble's shape — how much it bulges, like an umbrella dome.

The James Webb telescope peered into the early universe and saw a multitude of mysterious red dots. Their glow didn't resemble familiar galaxies or stars. The answer was unexpected: these are growing black holes, born without a stellar stage.

In the dense, star-forming gas cloud W44, the ALMA telescope has spotted eight tiny clumps racing at enormous speeds. In position–velocity maps, each one looks like the letter V, just like the previously discovered 'Bullet'. This resemblance hints at a common origin.

Thanks to gravitational lens — an effect predicted by Fritz Zwicky, where a galaxy cluster acts like a magnifying glass — the James Webb Space Telescope spotted two red dots in a galaxy 800 million years after the Big Bang.

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.

Two houses with identical facades but different interior layouts: from the outside the V-shaped spectrum looks the same, but inside there are different light sources and different amounts of dust. That is exactly how the two populations of distant galaxies that astronomers have long confused appear.

At the center of the supernova remnant SN 1987A, 168,000 light-years from Earth, hides an object that astronomers have been seeking for 37 years. This is the closest supernova to have exploded in front of modern telescopes, and the only one where the compact remnant has yet to be seen directly.