"In 1971, the Uhuru satellite tracked X-ray bursts that were strong, uneven, and very short. Their brevity meant the unseen source was smaller than Earth’s moon. Their pattern ruled out a pulsar. Cygnus X-1 became the first verified black hole. It’s paired with a star."
Cygnus X-1’s black hole is the hypernova afterlife of a supermassive star. The remnant mass of 14.8 Suns is crunched so tightly that nothing—not gas, dust, or even light—can escape its gravitational grip. We can’t see the black hole. How do we know it’s there?
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Accretion Disk
The black hole is eating its companion, a blue supergiant. Gas from the star streams away and accretes (collects) in a swirling disk around the black hole. It then falls inside or shoots into space by way of two gas jets, similar to a neutron star’s bipolar outflow.
Stellar Black Hole
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Manatee Nebula
The Manatee Nebula is a microquasar, a black hole and star pair with a massive accretion disk that shines bright in X-ray and radio wavelengths. The black hole’s magnetic field channels particles into two wobbly gas jets, each traveling close to the speed of light.
Cygnus X-1 Rank 3
Gamma-Ray Burst
When stellar black holes collide with each other or neutron stars, they create a bigger black hole. The blast also gives off a gamma-ray burst (GRB), the second-biggest release of energy after the Big Bang. So far, all GRBs detected have come from beyond the Milky Way.
Cygnus X-1 Rank 6
Trivia[]
Artist's impression of the binary system
Cygnus X-1 is a galactic X-ray source in the constellation Cygnus and was the first such source widely accepted to be a black hole.