By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A new investigation has revealed new details about the first black hole ever detected – which was spotted in 1964 and became the subject of a friendly bet between well-known scientists – including that it is as previously known.
Researchers said Thursday that new observations of the Cygnus X-1 black hole, orbiting a star with a large and bright star, show that it is 21 times our solar mass, about 50% more massive than previously believed.
Although still one of the most famous black holes, they found it to be slightly further away than previously calculated, at 7,200 light-years – the distance that light travels within a year, 9.5 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km) from the earth.
Black holes are extremely dense, with gravitational pulls so cruel that not even light escapes. Some – the ‘supermassive’ black holes – are huge, like those in our Milky Way system 4 million times the solar mass. Smaller “star-mass” black holes possess the mass of a single star.
Astronomer James Miller-Jones of Curtin University and the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia, said the Cygnus X-1 is the best-known black mass of the Milky Way and one of the strongest X-ray sources. the study was published in the journal Science.
This black hole rotates so fast, at almost light speeds, that it reaches the maximum rate suggested by physicist Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, Miller-Jones added.
It devours material that blows from the surface of the companion star, it orbits tightly, a “blue supergiant” of about 40 times our solar mass. It began its existence 4 million to 5 million years ago as a star up to 75 times the mass of the sun and collapsed into a black hole a few tens of thousands of years ago.
The research included data from the Very Long Baseline Array radio telescope consisting of ten U.S. observation stations.
After Cygnus X-1 was first tapped as a black hole, a bet was placed between physicist Stephen Hawking, who bet against it, and Kip Thorne, who bet it. Hawking eventually conceded by giving Thorne a subscription to Penthouse magazine.
“I did not place any bets on these findings,” Miller-Jones said.
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Peter Cooney)