LadyStanley
Registered User
http://www.sciencealert.com/astrono...-a-black-hole-at-1-percent-the-speed-of-light
Wow!
The real exciting news, however, is regular changes in the X-rays' intensity suggest this white dwarf takes just 28 minutes to complete an orbit, making it the current champion of cataclysmic dirty dancers.
"Prior to this discovery, the closest star around any likely black hole was a system known as MAXI J1659-152, which is in an orbit with a 2.4-hour period," said Miller-Jones.
"If the likely black holes in both systems have similar masses, this would imply an orbit three times larger in physical size than the one we found in X9."
To put it in perspective, the distance between the two objects in X9 is about 1 million kilometres (about 600,000 miles), or about 2.5 times the distance from here to the Moon.
Crunching the numbers, that's a journey of roughly 6.3 million kilometres (about 4 million miles) in half an hour, giving us a speed of 12,600,000 km/hr (8,000,000 miles/hr) - about 1 percent of the speed of light.
Wow!
