Six decades after its discovery, the first black hole ever detected still causes their head. It appears that the cosmic beak in the heart of the Cygnus X-1 system is 50% more massive than previously thought, making it the heaviest black mass ever directly observed.
Based on new observations, an international team of researchers estimates that the black hole is 21 times the mass of our sun and rotates faster than any other black hole. The recalculated weight makes scientists rethink how bright stars turn into black holes, and how fast they shed their skins before they die.
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The mass of a black hole depends on the characteristics of its parent star, such as the mass of the star and its metal (how much of it consists of elements heavier than helium). During a star’s lifetime, it casts its outer layers through explosions of stellar winds. Scientists believe that larger stars rich in heavy elements shed their mass faster than smaller stars with less metal.
“Stars lose mass to their surrounding environment by star winds blowing away from their surface. But to make a black hole so heavy and rotate so fast, we need to turn off the amount of mass that bright stars lose during their lifetime.” co-author Ilya Mandel, an astrophysicist from Monash University in Australia said in a statement.
Distance matters
In the new study, researchers estimated the mass of Cygnus X-1 using a proven method to measure the distances of stars from Earth, called parallax. As Earth around the sun, astronomers measure the visible motion of stars compared to the background of stars, and with a little trigonometry they can use the motion to calculate the star’s distance from the earth.
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In addition, the black hole of Cygnus X-1 slowly devours its bright blue companion by sucking in the star’s outer layers and forming a bright disk that revolves around the black hole. As the matter falls into the black hole, it is heated to millions of degrees and gives brilliant X-rays. Some of these issues are now escaping the black hole and are being spit out in powerful jets that are observing radio waves on Earth.
These are the characteristic bright jets that the research team detects using observations from the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a fixed-world network of ten radio telescopes spread across the United States and stretching from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands. Over a period of six days, they followed the full trajectory of the black hole around its companion and determined how much the black hole was moving in space.
They found that Cygnus X-1 is about 7,200 ligjare from Earth, which exceeded the previous estimate of 6,000 light-years. The updated distance indicates that the blue giant companion is brighter and more massive than previously thought, at 40 times more massive than our sun. And given the orbital period of the black hole, they could give a new estimate for the mass of the black hole – but preferably 21 solar masses.
“Using the updated measurements for the mass of the black hole and its distance from Earth, we were able to confirm that Cygnus X-1 rotates incredibly fast – very close to the speed of light and faster than any other black hole found so far. is, “said co-author of the study Lijun Gou, a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), in the statement.
The discovery is proof of how improvements in the sensitivity and accuracy of telescopes can reveal mysteries in even the most studied parts of our universe.
“As the next generation of telescopes comes online, their enhanced sensitivity will reveal the universe in more detail,” co-author Xueshan Zhao, a NAOC researcher, said in a statement. “It’s a great time to be an astronomer.”
The researchers presented their findings on February 18 in the journal Science.
Originally published on Live Science.