Dynamics of a high-mass microquasar jet under the influence of stelar wind

Abstract

A high-mass microquasar is a binary system formed by a massive star and a compact object orbiting around it. This compact object can emit a particle jet that will be hit by the star’s wind and affected by the rotation of the object around the star. In this work, our first goal was to determine the trajectory of the jet taking into account all these effects. We did this by modeling a simulation of the trajectory with the formulae from a previous article on this topic. Once we determined the trajectory, we studied how some of the parameters of the system affect the trajectory of the jet, and we did so by making 3 changes to our system. First, we changed the distance between the two bodies, then the intensity of the wind coming from the star and to finish we also changed the speed at which the jet propagated. After studying the resulting graphics, we concluded that when changing the size of the system, the bigger the system is, the less it is affected by the wind. This is because when we increase the size of the system, so does the period of rotation due to Keppler’s third law, which results in a decrease in tangential speed of the compact object that reduces the bending of the jet. We have, however, a strange behaviour for certain values of the size of the system where the bending is less than some bigger systems, and this is probably due to compensation of the forces or something else taking effect there. The intensity of the wind makes the jet to bend a lot more if the wind is more intense, as it will be receiving a stronger force from the wind. The speed of the jet makes that the faster jet is more affected by the wind, because the interaction between the two fluids, the jet and the wind, is stronger, causing it to bend more