Fifty Years After the Discovery of the First Stellar-Mass Black Hole: A Review of Cyg X-1

Jiachen Jiang

Fifty Years After the Discovery of the First Stellar-Mass Black Hole: A Review of Cyg X-1

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arxiv 2411.12507 v1 pith:LG4X6JWK submitted 2024-11-19 astro-ph.HE

Fifty Years After the Discovery of the First Stellar-Mass Black Hole: A Review of Cyg X-1

Jiachen Jiang This is my paper

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Around 50 years ago, the famous bet between Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne on whether Cyg X-1 hosts a stellar-mass black hole became a well-known story in the history of black hole science. Today, Cyg X-1 is widely recognised as hosting a stellar-mass black hole with a mass of approximately 20 solar masses. With the advancement of X-ray telescopes, Cyg X-1 has become a prime laboratory for studies in stellar evolution, accretion physics, and high-energy plasma physics. In this review, we explore the latest results from X-ray observations of Cyg X-1, focusing on its implications for black hole spin, its role in stellar evolution, the geometry of the innermost accretion regions, and the plasma physics insights derived from its X-ray emissions. This review primarily focuses on Cyg X-1; however, the underlying physics applies to other black hole X-ray binaries and, to some extent, to AGNs.

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Cited by 2 Pith papers

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Unchanged X-Ray Polarization During Accretion Dips in the Low Hard State of Cygnus X-1
astro-ph.HE 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

During Cygnus X-1 accretion dips the 2–8 keV polarization is unchanged within errors, indicating the absorbed disk does not contribute and supporting an extended oblate corona.
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gr-qc 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

Random walks on a Schwarzschild-de Sitter spatial slice have a higher escape probability than in flat space and produce low-frequency X-ray variability spectra that are shallower than flat-space walks.