Black Hole
Imagine a galaxy reflected in a fun house hall of mirrors. You'd see the galaxy, repeated again and again, with each image becoming more grotesque and distorted. That's how the universe looks near the event horizon of a black hole, one of the most warped places in the cosmos.
While physicists had some previous ideas about what such regions looked like, a new calculation has shown exactly what you would see around black holes, opening up potential new ways to test Einstein's theory of general relativity.
Around and around
The area near a black hole is very strange indeed. Looking directly at the heavy object wouldn't give your eyes much to focus on; light rays get swallowed by the black hole's event horizon, the point at which nothing can ever escape its massive gravitational influence.
A0620-00, or V616 Monocerotis
This black hole occasionally releases dramatic outbursts of X-ray light. One of those outbursts happened in 1917, and was how the system was discovered. During an outburst in 1975, V616 Monocerotis brightened over 100,000 times, becoming the brightest X-ray source known at the time.
.About 3,300 light-years away
.6.6 solar masses
.Paired with a K-type main sequence star orbiting every 7.75 hours — less than the average work day
.Its companion star is only around 40 percent of our sun’s mass. And the star is continually losing mass to the black hole, whose pull is so strong it’s squeezed into an ellipsoid instead of a sphere.
Cygnus X-1
Scientists suspect the black hole Cygnus X-1 began life as a star 40 times the mass of the sun. It likely collapsed directly to form a black hole some 5 million years ago — around the same time the first mammoths show up in fossil records on Earth.
.6,000 light-years away
.14.8 solar masses
.The black hole has an event horizon 185 miles across — about the length of New Hampshire.
.Cygnus X-1’s companion star is a blue supergiant variable star that orbits every 5.6 days at just one-fifth of the sun-Earth distance.
While physicists had some previous ideas about what such regions looked like, a new calculation has shown exactly what you would see around black holes, opening up potential new ways to test Einstein's theory of general relativity.
.About 3,300 light-years away
.6.6 solar masses
.Paired with a K-type main sequence star orbiting every 7.75 hours — less than the average work day
.Its companion star is only around 40 percent of our sun’s mass. And the star is continually losing mass to the black hole, whose pull is so strong it’s squeezed into an ellipsoid instead of a sphere.
.6,000 light-years away
.14.8 solar masses
.The black hole has an event horizon 185 miles across — about the length of New Hampshire.
.Cygnus X-1’s companion star is a blue supergiant variable star that orbits every 5.6 days at just one-fifth of the sun-Earth distance.