{"id":246258,"date":"2026-10-31T03:30:44","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T08:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/a-gamma-ray-powerhouses-smoking-gun-gas-trail-points-to-microquasar-jets"},"modified":"2026-10-31T03:30:44","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T08:30:44","slug":"a-gamma-ray-powerhouses-smoking-gun-gas-trail-points-to-microquasar-jets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/a-gamma-ray-powerhouses-smoking-gun-gas-trail-points-to-microquasar-jets","title":{"rendered":"A gamma-ray powerhouse\u2019s smoking gun? Gas trail points to microquasar jets"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In 2016, a binary star system emitting unusually strong gamma rays was discovered in our galactic neighborhood. Now, astronomers have found the smoking gun, or rather, a smoking trail of cool molecular gas that suggests jets emanating from a microquasar\u2014one of the few known outside the Milky Way\u2014are responsible.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike the Milky Way, which shrouds objects behind dust when looking toward the galactic core, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf satellite galaxy to our own, offers unhindered views of interesting and relatively nearby astrophysical phenomena.<\/p>\n<p>LMC P3 is one such stellar puzzle. It is the most luminous gamma-ray binary star system, composed of a compact object\u2014either a black hole or a neutron star\u2014alongside a massive star that is more than 30 times heavier than the sun. The two stars take roughly 10 days to orbit each other.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 2016, a binary star system emitting unusually strong gamma rays was discovered in our galactic neighborhood. Now, astronomers have found the smoking gun, or rather, a smoking trail of cool molecular gas that suggests jets emanating from a microquasar\u2014one of the few known outside the Milky Way\u2014are responsible. Unlike the Milky Way, which shrouds [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}