Astronomers have revisited the first ever stellar mass black hole ever identified, and found that it is at least 50 percent larger than we thought.
The black hole in the binary X-ray system Cygnus X-1 was recirculated clockwise in at 21 hours of solar eclipse. That makes it the largest stellar mass black hole ever discovered without the use of gravity waves, and it forces astronomers to rethink how black holes form.
Cygnus X-1 was first discovered as an X-ray source in 1964, and its status as a black hole went on to become a betting subject between astronomers Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne.
Scientists subsequently confirmed the interpretation of the black hole of the nature of the object, concluding that the X-ray diffusion was effected by the black hole splintering on a binary companion.
It has become one of the most studied black holes in the sky, which astronomers thought was largely misunderstood: an object of about 6,070 light-years away, with a mass of 14.8 solar masses, and a blue binary companion named HDE 226868 clocks in at around 24 solar masses.
We were, according to new ideas, wrong.
Astronauts have made new parallax observations of the system, looking at how they appear to move in the skies as the Earth moves around the sun, using the Baseline Array Long Long, a collection of radio telescopes working together as one continental collection dish.
In the end, their observations showed that Cygnus X-1 is a good distance longer than we thought. This means that the items themselves are much larger.
“We used radio telescopes to make high-precision measurements of Cygnus X-1 – the first black hole ever discovered,” explained astronomer James Miller Jones of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research ( ICRAR) in Australia.
“The black hole is in orbit a few days with a large companion star. By tracking for the first time the orbit of the black hole in the sky, we reconfigured the distance to the system, overriding it. 7,000 light-years from Earth.
“This meant that the black hole was more than 20 times larger than our Sun, making it the largest stellar mass black hole ever found without the use of gravity waves. this challenges our notions of how big stars change to form black holes. “
Previously, the M33 X-7 was the largest electromagnetically detected black hole, penetrating at 15.65 times the mass of the sun. At the time of its discovery, even the M33 X-7 challenged our black hole formation models.
Scientists decided that as the giant star fell to form the black hole at the end of its life, it lost a mass more slowly than models suggested. They believe something similar to Cygnus X-1.
“Stars lose mass to the environment around them through stellar winds that blow away from their surface. But to make a black hole so heavy, we need to measure the amount of mass that bright stars lose during their lives, ”said theoretical astronomer Ilya Mandel of the ARC Center of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Detection (OzGrav) in Australia.
The star leading up to the Cygnus X-1 black hole would have started out at about 60 solar masses, exploding off the outer material before the heart fell directly down to the thick material it is in. today, passing a supernova explosion.
Now, he’s locked in a close-knit, 5.6-day orbital dance with his blue-eyed companion, which now has a revised mass, bringing it up to 40 degrees of solar eclipse.
That’s big enough that it should, too, one day end up as a black hole, creating a binary black hole similar to the ones seen in the unions that generate gravitational waves.
However, it is unlikely that the binary will come together anytime soon. The revised speed measurement allows astronauts to rebalance other features of the Cygnus X-1. In a separate paper, astronomers have found that it spins almost as fast as the speed of light. That’s faster than any other black hole ever measured.
This is different from pull wave binaries, which have very slow or incorrect spins. This suggests that Cygnus X-1 followed a different evolutionary path than the black hole binaries we saw coming together.
Given the distance between Cygnus X-1 and HDE 226868, the researchers have found that the pair is unlikely to reunite within a time-equivalent sphere of Earth age – 13.8 billion years.
Examining the system now, before the second black hole fall occurs, that provides a rare opportunity to understand black hole binaries.
“Ideas like these tell us a lot directly about the possible evolutionary pathways of making double black holes, some of which ground-based gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO and Virgo have been used. find out regularly, “said physicist Ashley Ruiter of the University of New South Wales Canberra in Australia, who was not involved in the research.
“It’s great that we can still capture the binary ‘in action’ by electromagnetic light before it creates a double black hole – it will help refresh our theories about the close evolution of a binary star. “
The team ‘s research was published in Science.