Cygnus X-1, the supermassive black hole orbiting the center of our galaxy and one of the closest to Earth, is more than 25,000 light-years away.
New astronauts about the Cygnus X-1, the first black hole ever discovered, have astronauts questioning what they know about the most mysterious objects on Earth.
The Cygnus X-1 was discovered in 1964 when a pair of Geiger counters were carried aboard a sub-orbital rocket launched from New Mexico.
The research, published in the journal Science, shows in the system that the largest stellar-mass black hole ever found is without gravitational waves.
The object was the culmination of a famous scientific bet between physicist Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, with Hawking betting in 1974 that it was not a black hole. Hawking accepted the message in 1990.
In this latest work, an international team of astronauts used the Extreme Long Baseline Array – a continental-sized radio telescope made up of 10 ships across the United States – along with an ingenious approach to space travel. measure.
“If we can see the same thing from different places, we can work out the distance from us by measuring how far the object seems to be moving relative to the back,” said the council. principal investigator, Professor James Miller-Jones of Curtin University and the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).
“If you hold your finger out in front of your eyes and look at it with one eye at a time, you will see that your finger appears to be jumping from one place to another. one principle. “
“Over six days we saw a complete orbit of the black hole and used observations taken of the same system with the same telescope range in 2011,” Dr. Miller-Jones said. “This approach and our new measurements show that the system is more remote than previously thought, with a much larger black hole.”
Co-author Professor Ilya Mandel from Monash University and the ARC Center of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Detection (OzGrav) said the black hole is so big and really challenging as astronomers thought that they created. “Stars lose mass to their surrounding environment through high winds blowing away from their surface. But to make a black hole so heavy, we need to measure the mass of bright stars. losing during their lifetime “he said.
“The black hole in the Cygnus X-1 system began life as a star about 60 times the mass of the sun and fell tens of thousands of years ago,” he said. “Surprisingly, he changes his companion star – superpower – every five and a half days at just one-fifth of the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
“These new ideas tell us that the black hole is more than 20 times the mass of our sun – a 50 percent increase from previous estimates.”
Xueshan Zhao is co-author of the paper and a PhD candidate studying at the National Astronomical Observatories – part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) in Beijing.
“Using the updated measurements for the mass of the black hole and the distance from the Earth, I was able to confirm that Cygnus X-1 spins remarkably fast – very close to the speed of light and more faster than any other black hole found so far, “she said.” I’m at the beginning of my research career, so it’s a great opportunity to be part of an international team and help restore the buildings of the first black hole ever discovered. “
Next year, the world’s largest radio telescope – the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) – will begin construction in Australia and South Africa. “As the next generation of telescopes emerges online, their improved sensitivity reflects the Universe in more detail, reducing decades of effort invested by scientists and research teams across the globe. the world to better understand the cosmos and the alien and extraordinary objects that exist, “said Professor Miller-Jones.