Scientists Measure Cygnus X-1 Jet Power and Speed

Scientists have achieved a groundbreaking measurement of the power and speed of relativistic jets erupting from the black hole in the Cygnus X-1 system, located approximately 7,000 light-years from Earth in the Milky Way's Cygnus constellation. The jets, streams of superheated particles launched by the black hole, unleash energy equivalent to the output of 10,000 suns and travel at about 150,000 kilometers per second, or half the speed of light. This marks the first direct, instantaneous assessment of such phenomena, reported Thursday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The discovery stems from an international team led by Dr. Steve Prabu, now at the University of Oxford but formerly at Australia's Curtin University, which coordinated the study. Researchers analyzed 18 years of high-resolution radio images captured by a global network of telescopes using very long baseline interferometry, a technique that links observatories across continents to simulate a telescope the size of Earth. Cygnus X-1, identified as the first confirmed black hole in the 1960s, consists of a stellar-mass black hole about 21 times the mass of the sun orbiting a blue supergiant star. As the black hole...