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The Manatee Nebula. (Image credit: ).
Stephenson and Sanduleak 433 or SS 433 is a strange system identified in the late 1970s, consisting of a black hole vampirically feeding on a binary stellar companion. The black hole feeds haphazardly on material from the outer layers of its stellar companions, belching or spewing food in streams of high-speed jets. Since the 1980s, scientists began to characterize SS 433 as a natural particle accelerator, capable of accelerating particles to nearly 26 percent of the speed of light.
The SS 433 system forms what is known as a microquasar and is located at a distance of 18,000 light years in the equatorial constellation of Aquila. It is located within the supernova remnant designated W50, also known as the Manatee Nebula. Scientists knew that black hole jets accelerate high-energy particles known as cosmic rays, but they didn’t fully understand the underlying process. Between April and May 2023, NASA’s IXPE Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer spacecraft spent eighteen days observing the system and discovered something that surprised scientists.
The natural particle accelerator in the manatee nebula. (Image credit: NASA).
Instead of a chaotic, turbulent magnetic field surrounding SS433, the researchers discovered a well-ordered field. The observations raise the possibility that the black hole’s powerful jets become trapped and stretched when they collide with surrounding interstellar material, which has a direct influence on their alignment within the particle acceleration region. The researchers aim to investigate whether the same mechanism aligns the magnetic fields in other supernova remnants.
An article describing the findings. has been published in The letters from the astrophysical diary. Astrophysicist Philip Kaaret says, “The IXPE data show that the magnetic field near the acceleration region points in the direction in which the jets are moving. “The high level of polarization observed with IXPE shows that the magnetic field is well ordered, with at least half of the field aligned in the same direction.”