These jets appear to be rapidly rotating with high-speed clouds of plasma — potentially just minutes apart — shooting out of the black hole in different directions.

Lead author Associate Professor James Miller-Jones, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), says these black holes are some of the most extreme objects in the Universe. He adds: “This is one of the most extraordinary black hole systems I’ve ever come across.

X-ray light echoes from the 2015 nova eruption

(Andrew Beardmore (Univ. of Leicester) and NASA/Swift)

“Like many black holes, it’s feeding on a nearby star, pulling gas away from the star and forming a disk of material that encircles the black hole and spirals towards it under gravity.

V404 Cygni was first identified as a black hole in 1989 when it released a big outburst of jets and radiation, followed by astronomers finding previous outbursts in observations from 1938 and 1956.

Miller-Jones continues: “What’s different in V404 Cygni is that we think the disk of material and the black hole are misaligned.

“This appears to be causing the inner part of the disk to wobble like a spinning top and fire jets out in different directions as it changes orientation.”

In 2015, when V404 Cygni experienced another very bright outburst which lasted for two weeks — telescopes around the world were trained upon it to study what was going on. This granted the team a wealth of data to make their observations.

As Miller-Jones points out: “Everybody jumped on the outburst with whatever telescopes they could throw at it.

“So we have this amazing observational coverage.”