Today's Colloquium: Discovering the origin and nature of jets from accreting stellar-mass black holes

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There is a universal connection between the accretion and ejection phenomena that are observed in black holes across the mass scale, from stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries to supermassive black holes in AGN. Quantifying this relationship is the first step in understanding the key astrophysical problem of how jets are launched, accelerated and collimated.

X-ray binaries are ideal systems to study this relationship, as they evolve through outburst on humanly observable timescales. During such outburst, their luminosities increase by several orders of magnitude, with the thermal X-ray emission from the accretion disk and the radio emission from the relativistic jets undergoing dramatic, coupled changes.

I will present the results of a multiwavelength radio through to X-ray observing campaign of a Galactic black hole X-ray binary and discuss why these campaigns are critical to understand the processes that are occurring around a black hole X-ray binary.

In the image we see the contemporaneous evolution of the accretion inflow and the jet outflow, highlighting that time-resolved, multiwavelength observation are critical to the understanding these objects.