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By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A new examination has revealed new details about the first black hole ever detected – which was spotted in 1964 and was the subject of a friendly bet between renowned scientists – including that it is larger than what was known before.
Researchers said on Thursday that new observations of the Cygnus X-1 black hole, orbiting in a stellar marriage with a large and bright star, showed that it is 21 times the mass of our sun, about 50% more massive than ‘we never believed it before.
While still one of the closest known black holes, they found it to be a little further away than previously calculated, at 7,200 light-years – the distance light traveled in a year. , 9.5 trillion kilometers – from Earth.
Black holes are extremely dense, with gravitational attractions so fierce that not even light escapes. Some – “supermassive” black holes – are huge, like the one in the center of our Milky Way galaxy 4 million times the mass of the sun. Small “stellar mass” black holes have the mass of a single star.
Cygnus X-1 is the largest known stellar-mass black hole in the Milky Way and among the most powerful x-ray sources seen on Earth, said astronomer James Miller-Jones of Curtin University and the Center international radio astronomical researcher in Australia, which led the study published in the journal Science.
This black hole spins so quickly, almost at the speed of light, that it is approaching the maximum rate envisioned by physicist Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, Miller-Jones added.
It devours matter blowing off the surface of the companion star on which it orbits closely, a “super blue giant” about 40 times the mass of our sun. 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 tens of thousands of years ago.
The research included data from the Very Long Baseline Array radio telescope comprising 10 US observation stations.
After Cygnus X-1 was first classified as a black hole, a bet was made between physicists Stephen Hawking, who bet against this fact, and Kip Thorne, who bet it did. Hawking finally conceded a subscription to Penthouse magazine in front of Thorne.
“Indeed, I had no bets on those results,” Miller-Jones said.
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Peter Cooney)
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