Speaker
Description
Outflows from compact objects and massive stars play a key role in shaping the interstellar medium through injecting significant amounts of energy and momentum. The visible imprints that outflows produce on sites where they impact the interstellar medium allow them to act as natural calorimeters, providing a way to quantify the energy required to form and maintain them. High-mass X-ray binary systems within our Galaxy can produce multiple outflow mechanisms, including relativistic jets and stellar winds, making it essential to disentangle their respective feedback signatures. We present IRAM-30m molecular gas observations of the high-mass X-ray binary Cygnus X-1, aimed at probing and characterizing the interaction between these outflows and the surrounding interstellar medium. Our analysis reveals evidence that both the stellar wind and the relativistic jets are actively shaping the environment around Cygnus X-1, including the discovery of two previously unobserved structures in the surrounding environment. Ultimately, this work demonstrates that molecular line imaging can effectively disentangle complex feedback processes in environments where jets and stellar winds coexist.