Speaker
Description
Black hole X-ray binaries are accreting objects that launch powerful relativistic jets. These systems evolve through bright outburst phases on timescales of days to months, allowing us to probe jet and accretion phenomena in real-time. As X-ray binaries produce highly variable emission, time-series observations can be a powerful tool to study these systems. However, as these systems emit across the electromagnetic spectrum, with the in-flowing matter dominating shorter wavelengths and the outflowing jet dominating longer wavelengths, we need a suite of rapid-timing capable facilities to take full advantage of time-domain techniques. With methodologies for rapid-timing observations successfully developed across the electromagnetic spectrum, we now have access to a completely new data dimension, rapid variability properties, to understand and measure fundamental jet properties (e.g., size scales, geometry, jet speeds, jet power, and the sequence of events leading to jet launching). In this talk, I will discuss new rapid mm-timing data of the black hole X-ray binary Cygnus X-1, obtained using a combination of the MUSTANG2 instrument on the Green Bank Telescope and new algorithms designed to extract time-series measurements. Further, I will discuss several exciting new directions where multi-wavelength timing studies are headed.