Astrophysicists from the IAC discover an intense wind in the neighbourhood of a black hole

09/05/2016
V404 V404 Cygni is a black hole within a binary system located in the constellation of Cygnus. In such systems, of which less than 50 are known, a black hole of around 10 times the mass of the Sun is swallowing material from a very nearby star, its companion star. During this process material falls onto the black hole and forms an accretion disc, whose hotter, innermost zones emit in X-rays. In the outer regions, however, we can study the disc in visible light, which is the part of the spectrum observable with the 10.4m Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC); the biggest optical-infrared telescope in the world, situated at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma, Canary Islands) in Spain. The IAC researcher Jorge Casares participated in the study, published in the journal Nature. >> Read more