Black hole V404 Cygni, located approximately 8,000 light-years from Earth, and is part of a binary system in which it and a sun-like star orbit one another. It’s constantly feeding on its stellar companion, and as that material gets sucked in, it forms an accretion disk around the black hole. Some of these particles falling into the black hole escape through relativistic jets, but astronomers have have never seen jets that wobble as rapidly as those from V404 Cygni, which were observed oscillating over time periods of only a few minutes. Read more for another video and additional information.
“Astronomers think the black hole’s swift wobble can be explained by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which stipulates that extremely massive objects bend space and time. As particles get sucked toward the black hole, the accretion disk gets denser and hotter closer to the center. Near the center of the disk is a dense, doughnut-shaped ring that is ‘puffed up’ by radiation pressure. While the accretion disk is about 6.2 million miles across, the doughnut is only a few thousand kilometers wide. This is where space gets warped by the immense gravitational force,” according to Space.com.
