{"id":20061,"date":"2024-02-03T04:31:08","date_gmt":"2024-02-02T23:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=20061"},"modified":"2025-04-05T22:08:32","modified_gmt":"2025-04-05T16:38:32","slug":"what-is-cygnus-x-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/what-is-cygnus-x-1\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Cygnus X-1?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><strong>About Cygnus X-1:<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>It was discovered over four decades ago.<\/li>\n<li>It is one of the first <strong>confirmed black hole systems<\/strong> in our galaxy.<\/li>\n<li>The black hole in Cygnus X-1 is 20 times heavier than the Sun, and has a companion &#8211; a heavy supergiant star (40 times more massive than the Sun) in a binary system.<\/li>\n<li>It is located at a distance that is about 400 times more than the distance between Earth and Sun.<\/li>\n<li>Due to the gravitational pull of the black hole, material from the supergiant falls and spirals in towards the black hole.<\/li>\n<li>This process leads to the formation of a thin accretion disk which is responsible for soft X-rays.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3><strong>Significance of X-ray Polarisation<\/strong><\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Normal X-ray measurements only reveal the <strong>energy or intensity of the radiations<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>Polarisation characteristics of X-rays, which tells about the <strong>orientation of the oscillating electric field, h<\/strong>olds clues on the geometry and other <strong>properties of the black hole.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>This measurement of high polarization in this source in the 100-380 keV implies that radiation emitted from the source at energies above 100 keV, is likely to have originated at the black hole jet<\/li>\n<li>Polarization is one of the properties that a photon carries from the celestial objects in the sky.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Q1: What are X-rays?<\/h3>\n<p>X-rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation, similar to visible light. Unlike light, however, x-rays have higher energy and can pass through most objects, including the body. Medical x-rays are used to generate images of tissues and structures inside the body.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\nsource:<a href=\"https:\/\/indianexpress.com\/article\/cities\/pune\/astrosat-detects-polarised-high-energy-x-rays-black-hole-9131164\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">AstroSat detects polarised high energy X-rays for first time from a black hole<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cygnus X-1 is one of the first confirmed black hole systems in our galaxy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":20062,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-20061","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","8":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20061\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}