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Cygnus X-1

Stellar-mass black hole in an X-ray binary

Cygnus X-1 (abbreviated Cyg X-1) is a galactic X-ray source in the constellation Cygnus and was the first such source widely accepted to be a black hole. It was discovered in 1964 during a rocket flight and is one of the strongest X-ray sources detectable from Earth, producing a peak X-ray flux density of 2.3×10−23 W/(m2⋅Hz) (2.3×103 jansky). It remains among the most studied astronomical objects in its class. The compact object is now estimated to have a mass about 21.2 times the mass of the Sun and has been shown to be too small to be any known kind of normal star or other likely object besides a black hole. If so, the radius of its event horizon has 300 km "as upper bound to the linear dimension of the source region" of occasional X-ray bursts lasting only for about 1 ms.

Description from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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Key facts

Distance

~7,200 light-years

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