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Modern science is more about patience and persistence than about great epiphanies. It is therefore extremely satisfying when you make a breakthrough, as it means a lot of hard work has finally paid off. After monitoring a fairly quiet black hole for nearly 26 years, my colleagues and I were thrilled to suddenly catch it emit a powerful wind — something we didn’t even know black holes could do.

We first discovered the black hole back in 1990, when I was based at an observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands. Orbiting space missions had just detected a mysterious and very bright new X-ray source in the star constellation Cygnus that had undergone a huge outburst. Our observations revealed that V404 Cygni was a black hole of around ten times the mass of our sun. This was the first object in our galaxy to be unequivocally identified as a black hole.

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The black hole is part of a binary system — it has a low-mass companion star (only about half the mass of our sun) that orbits around the black hole every 6.5 days. During this process it continuously swallows material from the star. The matter falling towards the black hole forms a so-called accretion disc. Its hotter, innermost zones emit X-rays, which we cannot detect from the Earth’s surface, as they are absorbed by our atmosphere, and hence must be studied from space. The outer regions of the disc, however, emit visible light, which means we can observe this region from the ground.