Round and Round the Microquasar Goes

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Round and Round the Microquasar Goes

Path of the microquasar (red) known as Scorpius X-1 compared with the path of the Sun (yellow) through the Milky Way Galaxy for the past 230 million years. A microquasar is a pair of interacting stars where one of them is usually a dead star, such as a neutron star or a black hole. Material from the normal star is streaming around and on to the remnant, creating a disk of material. Magnetic fields wreak havoc on the material, whipping it up and out of the disk as enormous jets.

Credit: Mirabel and Rodrigues, NRAO/AUI/NSF

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