Like a candle in the wind: Microquasars and their interaction with the circum-binary medium

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AST-0908690HeinzThis award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Relativistic jets are collimated beams of ultra-hot, magnetized plasma, shooting away at very close to the speed of light from black holes and neutron stars. Microquasars are X-ray binaries (neutron stars or black holes in orbit around a normal star) that fire off such relativistic jets, and hold great promise for new insight into jet and black hole physics. One of the best ways to measure important jet parameters is to study their interaction with the environment they must run into. This project will investigate the interaction of microquasar jets with the circum-binary medium in order to understand the effects of winds and radiation drag on the kinematics and stability of jets, and to construct self-consistent models of radio and high-energy emission from microquasar jets. These will be the first three-dimensional simulations of jets propagating through stellar winds and radiation fields, starting with non-relativistic hydro, relativistic hydro, and non-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations. Adding a sub-grid particle transport module to the FLASH code will track populations of relativistic particles and allow calculation of emission and absorption within the jet and the effects of radiation drag on the jet. A turbulent diffusion algorithm will permit study of both microscopic and macroscopic mixing. Finally, the results will be used to calculate the predicted TeV gamma-ray and neutrino flux for the simulated jets.The work includes graduate student training. Results will also be used to enhance the public outreach program at the university?s Space Place, and lectures will be archived for both professional and general audiences at the project web-site. All analysis and simulation tools developed will be publicly released through the same web-site, and any enhancements created will be incorporated in the publicly available FLASH code used in the research.