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Relativistic Jets in Stellar Systems

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The Formation and Disruption of Black Hole Jets

Part of the book series: Astrophysics and Space Science Library ((ASSL,volume 414))

Abstract

Albeit their nature remains elusive, relativistic, collimated outflows of energy and particles appear to be a nearly ubiquitous feature of accreting black holes. As evidence accumulates for a dominant role of the jet in dissipating the liberated accretion power, questions around their powering mechanism and even composition remain unanswered. In this chapter, I will describe the main observational properties of relativistic jets from black hole X-ray binaries, with a particular emphasis on recent developments around three main topics: (i) the role and relative importance of the accretion flow, relativistic jet and equatorial wind; (ii) the existence of global luminosity-luminosity correlation(s) in quiescent and hard state black hole X-ray binaries, and their interpretation(s); (iii) (ways of estimating) the total jet power, and its relation to black hole spin.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The ‘standard’ \(P_{\mathrm{j}} \propto a^{2}\) scaling relation is formally correct only for slowly spinning black holes; see Tchekhovskoy et al. (2011) for a full relativistic treatment.

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank all her long-term collaborators in this field, and in particular: Dave Russell, James Miller-Jones, Rob Fender, Sera Markoff, Peter Jonker, Jeroen Homan, Stephane Corbel and Rich Plotkin.

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Gallo, E. (2015). Relativistic Jets in Stellar Systems. In: Contopoulos, I., Gabuzda, D., Kylafis, N. (eds) The Formation and Disruption of Black Hole Jets. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 414. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10356-3_2

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