Now imagine flying toward one of these objects and circling around it at some distance; light from the stars behind it becomes bent by its strong gravitational field. Now imagine approaching and orbiting the photonsphere . Think of falling deeper and deeper towards the black hole, as tidal forces stretch your body into spaghetti. Imagine spiraling inward toward a singularity in space-time, an infinitely dense geometric point where all the laws of physics, in fact the very fabric of space and time, break down and cease to exist. Picture watching someone take the plummet towards the event horizon , seeming never to quite reach it, though he himself feels he has already crossed it in a finite amount of time.

These are just a few of the strange phenomena that accompany the compact stellar remnants coined black holes by physicist John Wheeler. These are strange and fascinating objects, but as of yet, they are still considere

Nothing we have discussed so far proves, or even indicates that the object orbiting around the supergiant HDE226868 is a black hole. We could very easily be dealing with a small star, too faint to see in optical wavelengths, or possibly a planet sized hunk of rock. Luckily, it only takes a bit more analysis of the data to narrow these possibilities down.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar first determined the upper limit to the mass of a white dwarf as 1.4 solar masses. This value, called the Chandrasekhar mass limit, is still used today. Later, J.R. Oppenheimer and G.M. Volkoff determined the upper mass of a neutron star. It is called the Oppenheimer-Volkoff mass, and has been recalculated many times since. Because we are dealing with degenerate neutron gas, which we can only make educated guesses about the exact properties of, we cannot truly determine precisely what this limit is. It is usually said to be about 2 to 3 solar masses, and generally stays well below 4 or 5.

Soon afterward, it was determined that the star also has a very slight increase in brightness every 5.6 days. This variation can best be explained by visualizing the star being stretched by the gravitational pull of its unseen companion. When the star and the companion are side by side, relative to our point of view, the star looks egg-shaped and has more surface area. Hence, it is brighter:

Some common words found in the essay are:
Cygnus X-1, Furthermore X-rays, Neutron Stars, Introduction Black, HDE226868 Doppler, Cygnus X-1's, Compact Object, X-1 Copernicus, GM Volkoff, John Wheeler, black hole, cygnus x-1, black holes, neutron star, x-ray source, radio source, neutron stars, 56 days, potential black, compact object, dwarves neutron stars, binary nature hde226868, potential black holes, white dwarves neutron, infinitely dense geometric,
Approximate Word count = 2497
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)