Free Turn Right At Orion by Mitchell Begelman

luminosity flows out in proportion to the matter flowing in. I decided to concentrate only on black holes with donor stars and orderly disks. Then I noticed something that threatened to unravel even this cozy fragment of my story.

7
    SS 433
    The problem was that not all of the matter approaching Cygnus X-1 made it into the black hole. I should have seen this coming, although in my defense, I must point out that I was looking for evidence of inflow, not outflow. I had already noted that a few wisps of gas managed to escape, expelled by the dynamic action of magnetic flares. A little evaporation here and there was no cause for alarm, merely another example of the normal wastage that always seems to accompany physical processes in the Universe. But these filaments were not isolated escapees. Together they wove a disturbing pattern in front of me as I peered toward the distant black hole. Only as I retreated, and after I had spent some time examining images from my visit, did I see how much of the gas in the disk departed from the inward drift of the great viscous spiral. There it was, a streamer of gas shooting away from the disk, and there another—several streamers at once, twisting together, then merging and finally forming a jet of matter screaming off at high speed, perpendicular to the disk. Could it be that black holes expelled matter as well as drawing it in?
    Of course, I knew of a system that was an extreme example of this phenomenon. SS 433 was its surprisingly unromantic name, given how ingrained it had become in my generation’s store of iconic imagery. I hadn’t thought about it recently, but suddenly
it seemed to pose a towering challenge to my developing worldview. The intensively gravitating body of SS 433 seemed to be expelling far more matter than it absorbed.
    Everyone in my generation of scientists remembered the hoopla that surrounded the discovery of this object and its peculiar properties. It was one of the signal events of my early astronomical education. The fact that it ultimately proved to be representative of a very rare class of beasts may have knocked it out of the pantheon of astrophysical archetypes (few would rank it with pulsars or even with those mysterious bursts of gamma-ray radiation that were being so hotly debated at the time I left), but SS 433’s discovery had the element of surprise that reminds one that one’s view of the Universe may have to be revised on short notice.
    I will never forget the first announcement, because I missed it. This was at one of those conference series that are named not for the place at which they are actually being held but for the place at which they were first held. I was attending a meeting associated with one such venerable institution—the famous Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics—in Munich in 1978. It was late in the week, and my attention was flagging. The lectures were dull, and little new was being reported, so I took the afternoon off to visit one of the art galleries for which the city was famous.
    This was a big mistake. By the time I had slipped back to the enormous hotel ballroom in which the lectures were being held (in order to be seen dutifully nodding off during the concluding session), the buzz was just dying down, and all the astrophysicists were dashing off to the airport to report the new discovery to their groups. (Quaint world when there was no Internet!) Everyone was in such a hurry that I couldn’t get a straight story of what had happened, but I caught murmurs about “Doppler” and “anomalous redshift.” I slunk back to my home department, and there I encountered, for the first time as an insider in the profession, the kind of hyped-up astrophysical press coverage with which we all subsequently became familiar. Reports of
the discovery were featured under multicolumn headlines in all the papers and newsmagazines, “Mystery Star Both Coming and Going” blazed a