Space is usually pretty quiet. Most things just sit there. But in 1979, astronomers stumbled onto something that looked less like a star and more like a cosmic garden hose spraying water at millions of miles per hour. It was SS 433. Honestly, if you look back at the history of high-energy astrophysics, 1979 was the year everything got weird.
For a long time, black holes were mostly math. Theoretical ghosts. Then came the seventies. We started seeing X-rays from space, and suddenly, the math became real. SS 433—that's the "1979 black hole" everyone was scratching their heads over—was discovered in the constellation Aquila. It wasn't just another light in the sky. It was a binary system, a chaotic dance between a massive star and a compact object that we now know is almost certainly a black hole.
What makes this specific discovery so wild? The jets.
Imagine two beams of matter shooting out from a central point, moving at about 26% of the speed of light. That is absolutely blistering. We’re talking roughly 50,000 miles per second. Bruce Margon, an astronomer who did some of the heaviest lifting on this object back in the day, called it a "cosmic enigma." He wasn't exaggerating. The spectral lines were shifting all over the place because of the Doppler effect, moving back and forth like a celestial pendulum.
Why the 1979 Black Hole SS 433 Still Upsets People
People like things to be simple. SS 433 is not simple. It’s what we call a microquasar.
Usually, when we think of quasars, we think of the massive monsters at the centers of galaxies, millions of light-years away. But SS 433 is right here in our own Milky Way, about 18,000 light-years from Earth. It's like finding a miniature hurricane in your bathtub.
The system consists of a supergiant star—maybe 10 to 15 times the mass of our Sun—that is being slowly eaten by its companion. The companion is the black hole. As the gas from the star falls toward the black hole, it doesn't just go straight in. It swirls. It creates an accretion disk. And then, for reasons that involve magnetic fields so complex they make supercomputers sweat, some of that gas is screamed back out into space in those famous jets.
The Precession Puzzle
There is this thing called precession. Think of a spinning top. As it slows down, it starts to wobble. SS 433 does the same thing, but on a scale that defies logic. The jets don't just fire in one direction; they wobble in a cone shape every 162 days.
This creates a "corkscrew" pattern in space.
Imagine a sprinkler spinning in your yard, but the water is traveling at a quarter of the speed of light and the sprinkler head is a black hole. That is what was happening in 1979. Astronomers like Fabian and Rees were trying to model this, and the math was just barely holding together. It forced us to rethink how matter behaves under extreme gravity.
The Search for Cygnus X-1 and the 1979 Context
While SS 433 was the weird newcomer in 1979, it’s worth noting that the "black hole" conversation was already peaking because of Cygnus X-1.
By '79, Cygnus X-1 was the gold standard. It was the first object widely accepted as a black hole. But SS 433 was different because it was active. It was doing something right in front of our eyes. You have to understand, back then, we didn't have the James Webb Space Telescope. We didn't even have Hubble. We had ground-based observatories and early X-ray satellites like HEAO-1.
The data was grainy. It was noisy. Yet, the signal from SS 433 was so strong it couldn't be ignored.
It basically proved that black holes aren't just "holes." They are engines. They take energy and they throw it back out. If you've ever heard the phrase "black holes have no hair," it refers to the idea that they are simple objects characterized only by mass, charge, and spin. SS 433 showed us that while the hole might be simple, the environment around it is a mosh pit of radiation and relativistic particles.
What We Get Wrong About Black Holes From This Era
Most people think black holes just suck things in like a vacuum cleaner.
That's wrong.
If you replaced the Sun with a black hole of the same mass, Earth wouldn't get "sucked in." We’d just keep orbiting in the dark. SS 433 is a perfect example of this. The black hole isn't "sucking" the star in; the star is overflowing. It's too big for its own good, and the black hole is just there to catch the runoff.
Another misconception? That black holes are always invisible.
Technically, the event horizon is invisible. But the 1979 discovery showed that the area around the black hole can be the brightest thing in the galaxy. SS 433 glows across the entire spectrum. Radio waves. Infrared. Visible light. X-rays. Gamma rays. It’s a lighthouse.
The 1979 Legacy: Why You Should Care Today
You might be wondering why a 40-year-old discovery matters now.
It matters because SS 433 is a laboratory. We can't go to a black hole. We can't send a probe. But we can watch SS 433. In 2018, the HAWC (High-Energy Iterating Water Cherenkov) observatory detected ultra-high-energy gamma rays coming from the tips of those jets.
The jets are still firing. They are still hitting the surrounding nebula, known as W50 (or the "Manatee Nebula" because of its shape). This tells us that these cosmic engines can accelerate particles to energies far beyond anything we can do in the Large Hadron Collider.
A Quick Breakdown of the Stats (No Tables Needed)
The black hole in SS 433 is likely around 10 to 20 times the mass of our Sun. Its companion star is a massive A-type supergiant. The jets themselves extend for about 80 light-years before they slam into the surrounding gas. The temperature in the accretion disk reaches millions of degrees.
And the speed? Let’s talk about that speed again. 0.26c. If you could travel that fast, you’d go from the Earth to the Moon in about five seconds.
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How to Talk About Black Holes Without Sounding Like a Textbook
If you’re at a bar and someone mentions black holes, don't talk about event horizons and spaghettification. Talk about the "corkscrew jet."
Talk about how in 1979, we found a star system that behaves like a lawn sprinkler from hell. Mention that SS 433 is one of the few places in the universe where we can see the effects of special relativity in real-time. Because the jets are moving so fast, the light coming from the jet pointing at us is "blue-shifted" (shorter wavelengths) and the light from the jet pointing away is "red-shifted" (longer wavelengths).
It’s literally Einstein's theories playing out on a galactic stage.
The Controversy
Not everyone agreed it was a black hole at first. Some thought it was a neutron star. Neutron stars are also compact and weird, but they usually have a solid surface and a massive magnetic field that creates a pulsing effect. SS 433 didn't pulse. It screamed.
The sheer volume of matter being displaced—about 10,000 trillion tons per second—is way more than a neutron star can usually handle without exploding or collapsing further. Most experts now agree: it’s a black hole.
Actionable Insights: How to Follow the Story
If you want to dive deeper into the "1979 black hole" and modern high-energy physics, you don't need a PhD. You just need to know where to look.
First, check out the NASA High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEARC). They have the raw data from the missions that studied SS 433. It’s public. You can see the X-ray signatures for yourself.
Second, look up the Manatee Nebula (W50). Seeing the visual impact of the black hole's jets on the surrounding space puts the scale of this thing into perspective. The "ears" of the nebula are literally pushed out by the pressure of the jets from SS 433.
Third, follow the HAWC Observatory updates. They are the ones currently tracking the highest-energy particles coming out of this system. It turns out SS 433 is even more powerful than we thought in 1979.
Lastly, if you're ever in a dark sky area with a decent telescope, you can't see the black hole (obviously), but you can find the constellation Aquila. Knowing that a relativistic jet is screaming through that patch of sky at 50,000 miles per second changes how you look at the stars.
The universe isn't a static map. It’s a violent, beautiful, and incredibly fast-moving machine. SS 433 was the first time we really got a look at the gears turning.
Next Steps for the Curious
To truly grasp the scale of the SS 433 system, your next move is to compare its light curve data with a standard "quiet" black hole like V616 Monocerotis. You will see the difference between a "dormant" hole and the "active" 1979 monster. Observing the 162-day precession period in academic papers at ArXiv.org will give you the most current understanding of how the disk's tilt actually works. Look for papers mentioning "disk warping" to see the cutting edge of this 45-year-old mystery.