One of the biggest and first known black holes in the Milky Way galaxy is more massive than astronomers thought, a team of scientists announced on Thursday. The finding throws a wrench into long-held models of how massive stars evolve on the way to the ultimate doom.
Cygnus X-1, an unseen, X-ray-emitting object, and a fat blue star called HDE 226868 circle each other every 5.6 days. Cygnus X-1 was one of the earliest celestial sources of X-rays ever discovered, in 1964, when astronomers began lofting cosmic Geiger counters into space, and one of the first to be considered as a possible black hole. The X-rays are produced by gas that is heated to millions of degrees as it swirls around the cosmic drain.
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Astronomers Make a Weird Discovery: A Concentration of Smaller Black Holes Lurking Where They
This is an artist’s impression created to visualize the concentration of black holes at the center of NGC 6397. In reality, the small black holes here are far too small for the direct observing capacities of any existing or planned future telescope, including Hubble. It is predicted that this core-collapsed globular cluster could be host to more than 20 black holes. Credit: ESA/Hubble, N. Bartmann
Globular clusters are extremely dense stellar systems, which host stars that are closely packed together. These systems are also typically very old — the globular cluster at the focus of this study, NGC 6397, is almost as old as the universe itself. This cluster resides 7,800 light-years away, making it one of the closest globular clusters to Earth. Due to its very dense nucleus, it is known as a core-collapsed cluster.
First black hole ever detected is even more massive than first thought | Science & Tech News |
The first black hole that humanity ever discovered is much more massive than previously thought, according to new research.
The galactic X-ray source, later named Cygnus X-1, was discovered in 1965, when a pair of Geiger counters were carried on board a sub-orbital rocket launched from New Mexico.
It was the focus of a famous scientific bet between physicists Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne in 1974, with Professor Hawking wagering that it wasn't a black hole.
Scientists revisit the 1st black hole they ever discovered and realize it's bigger than they
New evidence suggests the first known black hole is bigger than previously thought, which may force scientists to reconsider their understanding of how giant stars give rise to black holes.
Scientists think stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to a few times the sun's mass, form when giant stars die and collapse in on themselves. The first black hole ever discovered was Cygnus X-1 , located within the Milky Way in the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan. Astronomers saw the first signs of the black hole in 1964 via gas it sucked away from a closely orbiting blue supergiant star.
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The White Dots in This Image Are Not Stars or Galaxies. They're Black Holes
The image above may look like a fairly normal picture of the night sky, but what you're looking at is a lot more special than just glittering stars. Each of those white dots is an active supermassive black hole.
And each of those black holes is devouring material at the heart of a galaxy millions of light-years away - that's how they could be pinpointed at all.
Totalling 25,000 such dots, astronomers have created the most detailed map to date of black holes at low radio frequencies, an achievement that took years and a Europe-sized radio telescope to compile.
We Thought We Understood The 'First' Black Hole. But We Were Wrong, Scientists Say
Astronomers have revisited the very first stellar-mass black hole ever identified, and found that it's at least 50 percent more massive than we thought.
The black hole in the X-ray binary system Cygnus X-1 has been recalculated to clock in at 21 times the mass of the Sun. That makes it the most massive stellar-mass black hole ever detected without the use of gravitational waves, and it's forcing 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 the subject of a wager between astrophysicists Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne.
The first black hole ever discovered is more massive than we thought | MIT Technology Review
Einstein first predicted the existence of black holes when he published his theory of general relativity in 1916, describing how gravity shapes the fabric of spacetime. But astronomers didn't spot one until 1964, some 6,070 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation. Geiger counters launched into space detected cosmic x-rays coming from a region called Cygnus X-1. (We now know the cosmic rays are produced by black holes.
Now, some 57 years later, scientists have learned that the black hole at Cygnus X-1 is much more massive than first believed—forcing us to once again rethink how black holes form and evolve. This time, the observations were taken from Earth's surface.
Happening on Twitter
If black holes do have hair—meaning they retain some information about their past—this could have implications for… https://t.co/iYyL8AAecB WIRED (from San Francisco/New York) Sun Feb 14 14:08:34 +0000 2021
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