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It's Alive Again: Monster Black Hole V404 Cygni Wakes After 26 Years


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Over the past week, ESA's Integral satellite has been observing an exceptional outburst of high-energy light produced by the black hole V404 Cygni that is devouring material from its stellar companion in our Milky Way galaxy, almost 8000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan.

 

On June 15th 2015, V404 Cygni, a system comprising a black hole and a star orbiting one another, made its comeback. In this type of binary system, material flows from the star towards the black hole and gathers in a disc, where it is heated up, shining brightly at optical, ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths before spiraling into the black hole. First signs of renewed activity in V404 Cygni were spotted by the Burst Alert Telescope on NASA's Swift satellite, detecting a sudden burst of gamma rays, and then triggering observations with its X-ray telescope. Soon after, MAXI (Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image), part of the Japanese Experiment Module on the International Space Station, observed an X-ray flare from the same patch of the sky

 

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