How do microquasars work?
Quasars are active galactic nuclei. Markarian 231, for example, consists of a pair of ultra-massive black holes that have masses of 4 and 150 million solar masses, orbiting each other at an enormous speed at a distance of 600 million light-years from our Solar System and emitting electromagnetic radiation in the whole spectrum. The brightest objects in the universe are too far away to study them in high resolution. Therefore, astronomers were excited about the discovery of microquasars. What proper quasars present at the scale of whole galaxies, microquasars mimic at the scale of a solar system. (more…)