Explore · 4 entities

Black Holes

Regions where gravity overwhelms even light.

C

1

Black hole
Cygnus X-1 (black hole)
The compact object of Cygnus X-1 — the first widely accepted black hole. A bright X-ray source in Cygnus discovered in 1964, it is a stellar-mass black hole of roughly twenty-one solar masses pulling gas from its blue-supergiant donor star (HD 226868). It was the subject of a famous bet between Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, which Hawking conceded in 1990.

M

1

Black hole
M87*
The supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy M87, the first black hole ever directly imaged, in 2019.

S

1

Black hole
Sagittarius A*
The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2022.

V

1

Black hole
V404 Cygni
A stellar-mass black hole of about nine solar masses in a binary system in Cygnus, and one of the nearest black holes with a precisely measured distance from radio parallax. Normally quiet, it erupted in a dramatic X-ray and radio outburst in June 2015 — a nearby microquasar caught devouring gas from its companion.