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Relativistic Jet from Black Hole

An artist's impression of a relativistic jet propagating away from a black hole at close to the speed of light. Such jets are formed by the inner regions of the accretion flow: matter flowing inwards towards the black hole, via processes which are not yet fully understood. The accretion flow emits primarily in X-rays, the relativistic jet in the radio band: by combing observations in each band we can try and understand how such jets form and how much energy they carry away from the black hole.

Professor Rob Fender

Professor of Astrophysics

Research theme

  • Astronomy and astrophysics

Sub department

  • Astrophysics

Research groups

  • Hintze Centre for Astrophysical Surveys
  • MeerKAT
  • Pulsars, transients and relativistic astrophysics
  • Rubin-LSST
  • The Square Kilometre Array (SKA)
  • Gamma-ray astronomy
Rob.Fender@physics.ox.ac.uk
Telephone: 01865 (2)73435
Denys Wilkinson Building, room 712
  • About
  • Publications

Cosmic rays, γ -rays, and neutrinos from discrete black hole X-ray binary ejecta

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press 546:2 (2026) stag080

Authors:

Nicolas J Bacon, Alex J Cooper, Dimitrios Kantzas, James H Matthews, Rob Fender

Abstract:

The origin of cosmic rays (CRs) from outside the Solar system is unknown, as they are deflected by the interstellar magnetic field. Supernova remnants are the main candidate for CRs up to PeV energies but due to lack of evidence, they cannot be concluded as the sources of the most energetic Galactic CRs. We investigate discrete ejecta produced in state transitions of black hole X-ray binary systems as a potential source of CRs, motivated by recent TeV -ray detections by LHAASO. Starting from MAXI J1820+070, we examine the multi-wavelength observations and find that efficient particle acceleration may take place (i.e. into a robust power law), up to eV, where is the ratio of particle energy to magnetic energy. From these calculations, we estimate the global contribution of ejecta to the entire Galactic spectrum to be , with the CR contribution rising to at PeV energies, assuming roughly equal energy in non-thermal protons, non-thermal electrons, and magnetic fields. In addition, we calculate associated -ray and neutrino spectra of the MAXI J1820+070 ejecta to investigate new detection methods with CTAO, which provide strong constraints on initial ejecta size of order Schwarzschild radii ( pc) assuming a period of adiabatic expansion.

Cosmic rays, gamma rays and neutrinos from discrete black hole X-ray binary ejecta

(2026)

Authors:

Nicolas J Bacon, Alex J Cooper, Dimitrios Kantzas, James H Matthews, Rob Fender

Publisher Correction: Evidence of mutually exclusive outflow forms from a black hole X-ray binary

Nature Astronomy Springer Nature (2026) 1-2

Authors:

Zuobin Zhang, Jiachen Jiang, Francesco Carotenuto, Honghui Liu, Cosimo Bambi, Rob P Fender, Andrew J Young, Jakob van den Eijnden, Christopher S Reynolds, Andrew C Fabian, Julien N Girard, Joey Neilsen, James F Steiner, John A Tomsick, Stéphane Corbel, Andrew K Hughes

Stellar-mass black holes on the millimetre fundamental plane of black hole accretion

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press (OUP) (2026) stag037

Authors:

Jacob S Elford, Ilaria Ruffa, Timothy A Davis, Martin Bureau, Rob Fender, Jindra Gensior, Thomas Williams, Hengyue Zhang

Abstract:

Abstract Recent work revealed the existence of a galaxy ‘millimetre fundamental plane of black hole accretion’, a tight correlation between nuclear 1 mm luminosity, intrinsic 2 – 10 keV X-ray luminosity and supermassive black hole mass, originally discovered for nearby low- and high-luminosity active galactic nuclei. Here we use mm and X-ray data of 5 X-ray binaries (XRBs) to demonstrate that these stellar-mass black holes also lie on the mm fundamental plane, as they do at radio wavelengths. One source for which we have multi-epoch observations shows evidence of deviations from the plane after a state change, suggesting that the plane only applies to XRBs in the hard state, as is true again at radio wavelengths. We show that both advection-dominated accretion flows and compact jet models predict the existence of the plane across the entire range of black hole masses, although these models vary in their ability to accurately predict the XRB black hole masses.

Large-scale radio bubbles around the black hole transient V4641 Sgr

Astronomy & Astrophysics EDP Sciences (2026)

Authors:

N Grollimund, S Corbel, R Fender, JH Matthews, I Heywood, FJ Cowie, AK Hughes, F Carotenuto, SE Motta, P Woudt

Abstract:

Black holes (BHs) in microquasars can launch powerful relativistic jets that have the capacity to travel up to several parsecs from the compact object and interact with the interstellar medium. Recently, the detection of large-scale very-high-energy (VHE) gamma-ray emission around the black hole transient V4641 Sgr and other BH-jet systems suggested that jets from microquasars may play an important role in the production of galactic cosmic rays. V4641 Sgr is known for its superluminal radio jet discovered in 1999, but no radio counterpart of a large-scale jet has been observed. The goal of this work is to search for a radio counterpart of the extended VHE source. We observed V4641 Sgr with the MeerKAT radio telescope at the and bands and produced deep maps of the field using high dynamic range techniques. L UHF We report the discovery of a large-scale (∼ 35 ), bow-tie-shaped, diffuse, radio structure around V4641 Sgr, with similar angular size to the extended X-ray emission discovered by XRISM. However, it is not spatially coincident with the extended VHE emission. After discussing the association of the structure with V4641 Sgr, we investigate the nature of the emission mechanism. We suggest that the bow-tie structure arose from the long-term action of large-scale jets or disk winds from V4641 Sgr. If the emission mechanism is of synchrotron origin, the radio/X-ray extended structure implies acceleration of electrons up to more than 100 as far as tens of parsecs from the black hole. pc TeV

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