Overview
- A Curtin University–led team reports in Nature Astronomy that Cygnus X-1’s twin jets were measured in real time using an Earth-spanning radio array.
- Researchers inferred jet force by tracking how the companion star’s powerful wind bent the jets by about two degrees in high-resolution radio images.
- The team found material racing at about 150,000 kilometers per second, which is roughly half the speed of light.
- The measured output equals the energy of about 10,000 Suns and shows that about 10% of the energy from infalling matter is carried away by the jets.
- The result provides a concrete calibration for computer models of black-hole feedback, and the approach could scale to many systems as new facilities like the Square Kilometer Array come online.