SS 433 is one of the most exotic

star system A star system or stellar system is a small number of stars that orbit each other, bound by gravitational attraction. A large group of stars bound by gravitation is generally called a '' star cluster'' or ''galaxy'', although, broadly speakin ...

s observed. It is located in the

Milky Way galaxy The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked ey ...

, and is an eclipsing X-ray binary system, with the primary being a stellar-mass

black hole A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light or other electromagnetic waves, has enough energy to escape it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can defo ...

. The spectrum of the secondary

companion star A binary star is a system of two stars that are gravitationally bound to and in orbit around each other. Binary stars in the night sky that are seen as a single object to the naked eye are often resolved using a telescope as separate stars, in ...

suggests that it is a late A-type star. SS 433 is the first discovered

microquasar A microquasar, the smaller version of a quasar, is a compact region surrounding a stellar black hole with a mass several times that of its companion star. The matter being pulled from the companion star forms an accretion disk around the black h ...

. It is at the centre of the supernova remnant W50. SS 433's designation comes from the initials of two astronomers at

Case Western Reserve University Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is a private research university in Cleveland, Ohio. Case Western Reserve was established in 1967, when Western Reserve University, founded in 1826 and named for its location in the Connecticut Western Res ...

Nicholas Sanduleak Nicholas Sanduleak (Romanian: Nicolae Sanduleac June 22, 1933 in Lackawanna, New York, United States – May 7, 1990) was an American astronomer. Biography Sanduleak's parents were born in Romania. His family moved to Cleveland soon after he w ...

and

Charles Bruce Stephenson Charles Bruce Stephenson (February 9, 1929 – December 3, 2001) was an American astronomer. He was born on a ranch in Little Rock, Arkansas, the only son of Chauncey Elvira Stephenson and Ona Richards. During his youth he made a telescope and ...

. It was the 433rd entry in their 1977 catalog of stars with strong emission lines.SS 433
David Darling, entry in ''The Internet Encyclopedia of Science'', accessed on line September 14, 2007. Its emission lines were studied by

Mordehai Milgrom Mordehai "Moti" Milgrom is an Israeli physicist and professor in the department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel. Biography He received his B.Sc. degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1 ...

in 1979.

Location

SS 433, also known as V1343 Aquilae, located at 5.5 kpc in the galactic plane (''l= 39.7° and b= -2.2°'')

System

The compact central object is consuming the companion star which rapidly loses mass into an

accretion disc An accretion disk is a structure (often a circumstellar disk) formed by diffuse material in orbital motion around a massive central body. The central body is typically a star. Friction, uneven irradiance, magnetohydrodynamic effects, and other ...

formed around the central object. The accretion disc is subject to extreme heating as it spirals into the primary and this heating causes the accretion disc to give off intense X-rays and opposing jets of hot hydrogen along the axis of rotation, above and below the plane of the accretion disc. The material in the jets travels at 26% of the

speed of light The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted , is a universal physical constant that is important in many areas of physics. The speed of light is exactly equal to ). According to the special theory of relativity, is the upper limit fo ...

. The companion star presumably had lower mass than the original primary object and was therefore longer lived. Estimates for its mass range from 3 to 30

solar mass The solar mass () is a standard unit of mass in astronomy, equal to approximately . It is often used to indicate the masses of other stars, as well as stellar clusters, nebulae, galaxies and black holes. It is approximately equal to the mass o ...

es. The primary and secondary orbit each other at a very close distance in stellar terms, with an orbital period of 13.082 days. Their orbit is very slightly eccentric, and it is slowly increasing at a rate of about seconds per second, or about 3 seconds per year.

Observational data

The jets from the primary are emitted perpendicular to its

accretion disk An accretion disk is a structure (often a circumstellar disk) formed by diffuse material in orbital motion around a massive central body. The central body is typically a star. Friction, uneven irradiance, magnetohydrodynamic effects, and other ...

. The jets and disk precess around an axis inclined about 79° to a line between Earth and SS 433. The angle between the jets and the axis is around 20°, and the precessional period is around 162.5 days. Precession means that the jets sometimes point more towards the Earth, and sometimes more away, producing both blue and red

Doppler shift The Doppler effect or Doppler shift (or simply Doppler, when in context) is the change in frequency of a wave in relation to an observer who is moving relative to the wave source. It is named after the Austrian physicist Christian Doppler, who ...

s in the observed visible spectrum. Also, the precession means that the jets corkscrew through space in an expanding helical spray. As they impact the surrounding W50 supernova remnant clouds, they distort it into an elongated shape. PIA24574-SS433-ULXray-20210709

Observations in 2004 by the

Very Long Baseline Array The Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) is a system of ten radio telescopes which are operated remotely from their Array Operations Center located in Socorro, New Mexico, as a part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). These ten ra ...

for 42 consecutive days gave new data and understanding of the action of the jets. It appears that the jets are sometimes impacting material shortly after being created and thus brightening. The material the jets are impacting appears to be replaced some of the time, but not always, leading to variations in the brightening of the jets. The spectrum of SS 433 is affected not just by

s but also by relativity: when the effects of the Doppler shift are subtracted, there is a residual redshift which corresponds to a velocity of about 12,000

kilometers The kilometre ( SI symbol: km; or ), spelt kilometer in American English, is a unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), equal to one thousand metres ( kilo- being the SI prefix for ). It is now the measurement unit used for ...

per second. This does not represent an actual velocity of the system away from the Earth; rather, it is due to

time dilation In physics and relativity, time dilation is the difference in the elapsed time as measured by two clocks. It is either due to a relative velocity between them ( special relativistic "kinetic" time dilation) or to a difference in gravitational ...

, which makes moving clocks appear to stationary observers to be ticking more slowly. In this case, the relativistically moving excited atoms in the jets appear to vibrate more slowly and their radiation thus appears red-shifted. In September 2018, A. U. Abeysekara et al. published in ''

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans ar ...

'' details of investigations using the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Gamma-Ray (HAWC) Observatory in

Mexico Mexico ( Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guate ...

. They reported teraelectronvolt γ-ray observations exceeding 25

TeV TEV may refer to: * Transient Earth Voltage: a term for voltages appearing on the metal work of switchgear due to internal partial discharges * TeV, or teraelectronvolt or trillion electron volt, a measure of energy * Total Enterprise Value, a ...

of the SS 433/W50 system that spatially resolve the lobes, and consistent with a single population of electrons with energies extending to at least hundreds of teraelectronvolts in a magnetic field of about 16 micro

gauss Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (; german: Gauß ; la, Carolus Fridericus Gauss; 30 April 177723 February 1855) was a German mathematician and physicist who made significant contributions to many fields in mathematics and science. Sometimes refer ...

.Scientists discover new nursery for superpowered photons
Space Daily, 2018-10-04

In popular culture

In ''

SNL ''Saturday Night Live'' (often abbreviated to ''SNL'') is an American late-night live television sketch comedy and variety show created by Lorne Michaels and developed by Dick Ebersol that airs on NBC and Peacock. Michaels currently serves a ...

'' Season 4 (1979),

Father Guido Sarducci Father Guido Sarducci is a fictional character created by American comedian Don Novello. Sarducci is a chain-smoking priest with tinted glasses, who works in the United States as gossip columnist and rock critic for the Vatican newspaper ''L'Osserv ...

mentions SS 433. In the ''Seven Wonders of The World'' documentary series,

Arthur C. Clarke Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (16 December 191719 March 2008) was an English science-fiction writer, science writer, futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host. He co-wrote the screenplay for the 1968 film '' 2001: A Spac ...

mentions SS 443 as one of his "seven wonders of the universe".

Location

System

Observational data

In popular culture

See also

References

Further reading