"Shooting for the Stars: Jet-Wind Interactions and their Role in Understanding Jet Physics"

Relativistic Jets carry vast amounts of energy and magnetic flux from accreting black holes into the interstellar and intergalactic medium. They are routinely invoked as key sources of feedback in structure formation. And yet, after over 60 years of study, the mechanisms through which they couple with their environment, and even their fundamental properties like particle content, velocity, and instantaneous power are still poorly understood. I will discuss a mechanism by which we can shed light on some of the outstanding questions in jet physics: Their interaction with stellar winds, on scales from Galactic X-ray binaries to supermassive black holes in galaxy clusters.