Rob Fender : Jet-driven cavities around powerful galactic particle accelerators

Описание: Speaker : Prof. Rob Fender (University of Oxford)
Date : 9th December 2025
Title : Jet-driven cavities around powerful galactic particle accelerators
Abstract : Our galaxy is a violent and dynamic environment, in which millions of
black holes and neutron stars exist, many thousands in highly active
systems called X-ray binaries (aka ‘microquasars’) which dominate the
X-ray luminosity of the Milky Way. Known for decades, observations over
the past seven years with the MeerKAT radio telescope have
revolutionised our understanding of how the powerful jets from these
stellar mass black holes carve out parsec-scale cavities in the
interstellar medium, transferring vast amounts of energy over twelve
orders of magnitude in scale. In parallel, astonishing discoveries by
ground-based Cherenkov detectors have revealed the same systems to be
luminous sources of very high energy gamma-ray emission, and the new
favourite candidates to explain the peta-electronvolt cosmic ray
spectrum beyond the ‘knee’ in the cosmic ray spectrum. In this talk I
will bring an observational radio astronomer’s perspective to this
puzzle and see if these two new strands of discovery can be tied together.