Astronomers have long struggled to clock the speed and power of Cygnus X-1, a famous stellar-mass black hole located roughly 7,200 light-years away.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The black hole was clearly a beast, yet the data to prove its true workload remained elusive.<\/p>\n
Now, thanks to a global network of radio telescopes and a bit of cosmic wind-watching, a Curtin University-led team has finally estimated the speed of its massive jets.<\/p>\n
Surprisingly, the study reveals that these jets blast material into space at 150,000 kilometers per second (93,205 miles per second). That is half the speed of light.<\/p>\n
To put the energy in perspective, the power output of these twin beams is equivalent to 10,000 Suns burning at once.<\/p>\n
Dancing jet technique<\/p>\n
Cygnus X-1<\/a> is a high-mass X-ray binary system and the first celestial object widely confirmed to be a black hole.\u00a0<\/p>\n It consists of a stellar-mass black hole \u2014 about 21 times the mass of the Sun \u2014 locked in a tight orbit with a massive supergiant star.\u00a0<\/p>\n As the black hole\u2019s gravity strips material from its companion, the gas forms a glowing accretion disk that emits intense X-rays and powers relativistic jets<\/a> traveling at extreme speeds.\u00a0<\/p>\n Famously the subject<\/a> of a friendly wager between Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, the system remains a natural laboratory for studying the extreme physics of gravity and galactic evolution.<\/p>\n However, measuring something thousands of light-years away is rarely straightforward.<\/p>\n To do it, lead author Dr. Steve Prabu and his team turned to a \u201ctelescope the size of the Earth\u201d \u2014 an array of linked dishes spanning vast distances.\u00a0<\/p>\n It enabled the capture of a sequence of images showing the jets being buffeted. As the black hole moves through its orbit, these winds slam into its jets, pushing and bending them.<\/p>\n The power of the jets was determined by measuring the degree of their deflection caused by the wind from the nearby star.<\/p>\n Anchoring the universe<\/p>\n Astronomers and physicists mostly build massive computer simulations to understand how the universe grew.\u00a0<\/p>\n These models rely on a specific assumption: that 10% of the energy released by matter falling into a black hole is emitted as jets.<\/p>\n Until now, the \u201c10% rule\u201d was mostly an educated guess.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can now use this measurement to anchor our understanding of jets, whether they are from black holes 10 or 10 million times the mass of the Sun,\u201d said<\/a> co-author Professor James Miller-Jones.\u00a0 <\/p>\n Whether a black hole is ten times the mass of the Sun<\/a> or ten million, the physics appears to be the same. The data confirmed that the 10% efficiency used in simulations is remarkably accurate.<\/p>\n