By all accounts it seems to be a neutron star, though it's an unusual one at that. The discovery of the feeding black hole was made as part of the SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey, conducted by the 1.3-meter (4.3 feet) telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. Space 25 October 2022 By Michelle Starr (Pobytov/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images) A relatively small, dense object cloaked within a cloud of its own exploded remains just a few thousand light-years away is defying our understanding of stellar physics. The quasar has a brightness of magnitude 14.5 when viewed from Earth, meaning it is only slightly dimmer than Pluto and bright enough to potentially be spotted by skywatchers with good telescopes in a very dark area. Artists Impression of Cygnus X-1 Location of Cygnus X-1 Since the 1970s, more have been discovered. The star that is nearest to the Black Hole is named HDE 226868. Cygnus X-1 is close to a star and feeds off it, pulling matter from the Sun into the hole. In fact, this quasar (designated SMSS J114447.77- 430859.3) is also the most luminous of these events for around the past two-thirds of the universe's 13.8 billion-year existence. The picture below is N.A.S.As artists impression of what Cygnus X-1 looks like. This rapid accretion of matter to the surface of the black hole has also resulted in a quasar blasting out enough energy to make it 7,000 times brighter than the light from every star in the Milky Way. "Perhaps two big galaxies crashed into each other, funneling a whole lot of material onto the black hole to feed it." "Now, we want to know why this one is different - did something catastrophic happen?" lead researcher Christopher Onken, a researcher at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University (ANU), said in a statement.
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