The First Black Hole - Cygnus X-1

This is really cool. Of course, this is a Rush fan site at the core, so sometimes we do stupid fanboy crap and post interesting things like this.

As we all know, Cygnus X-1 is a great Rush song and the first chapter of Hemispheres. But aside from knowing that some dude in a ship called Rocinante (another story for another day) got sucked into a black hole called Cygnus X-1, do we know anything about it?

First off - of course it turns out that a Canadian discovered Cygnus to be the first recorded black hole in 1971. I guess that helps to explain why the boys were interested in this topic:

" Working at the David Dunlap Observatory's 74-inch reflector, Canada's largest telescope, Bolton attracted worldwide attention as the first astronomer to state without doubt that the X-ray source known as Cygnus X-1 was actually a black hole, circling a blue star known only as HDE 226868, 11,000 light years away from Earth. It may be the most significant stellar observation ever made in this country."

http://news.utoronto.ca/bin/bulletin/nov10_97/art4.htm

And here is some really cool technical information on the black hole, Cygnus X-1 and its sister star HDE 226868:

" Cygnus X-1 is the classic black hole binary. The visually bright component, a highly luminious class O supergiant called HDE 226868, is centered in the picture up and to the left of the picture's brightest star, Eta Cygni. The black hole, in tight orbit about the supergiant, is made eveident through X-rays radiated by hot gas flowing to it from the tidally distorted much larger star. The gap in the middle of the image is the result of the absorption of distant starlight by thick clouds of interstellar dust. Were they not there, Cyg X-1 (rather HDE 226868) would be visible to the naked eye."

http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/cygx1.html

So thats our fun fact for the day. Hope you enjoyed it. Come back next time we'll have some milk and cookies with the next lesson.