Astronomers watched as jets blasting from a black hole cannibalized a blue supergiant companion star. Data from the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKA) radio telescope allowed the team to measure the power of these outbursts, finding them as powerful as the output of 10,000 suns, which could help to reveal how they shape entire galaxies around them.
The system studied by the team is known as Cygnus X-1 (Cyg X-1), located 7,000 light-years away and one of the brightest sources of X-rays in the sky. Cyg X-1 is thought to consist of a stellar-mass black hole estimated to have around 21 times the mass of the sun, which is feeding from a blue supergiant star.
