The findings, published in Nature Astronomy, focus on Cygnus X-1, a system containing the first black hole ever confirmed and a massive supergiant companion star.
Researchers found that the jets blasting from the black hole pack a punch equivalent to the energy output of 10,000 suns.
To make the breakthrough, scientists used a globe-spanning network of radio telescopes, effectively creating an Earth-sized observatory to track how the jets were pushed and bent by fierce stellar winds as the black hole orbited its companion.
The effect, described as “dancing jets”, resembles how strong gusts can distort a stream of water from a fountain.
By analysing how much the jets were deflected and factoring in the strength of the stellar wind, the team was able to calculate the jets’ power in real time, something that had previously eluded astronomers.
The study also pinned down the jets’ speed at around half the speed of light, or roughly 150,000 kilometres per second, resolving a longstanding challenge in black hole physics.
The research was led by the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy and the Curtin node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, in partnership with the University of Oxford.
Lead author Dr Steve Prabu, who conducted the work at Curtin and is now based at Oxford, said the sequence of images revealing the jets’ motion was key to the discovery.
He described the jets as “dancing” as they were repeatedly knocked off course by the powerful winds from the supergiant star during the system’s orbit.
Prabu said the findings provide crucial insight into how black holes interact with their surroundings.
“A key finding from this research is that about 10 per cent of the energy released as matter falls in towards the black hole is carried away by the jets,” Prabu said.
“This is what scientists usually assume in large-scale simulated models of the universe, but it has been hard to confirm by observation until now.”
Co-author Professor James Miller-Jones said previous techniques could only estimate average jet power over vast timescales from thousands to millions of years, making it difficult to compare with the immediate energy released by infalling matter.
“And because our theories suggest that the physics around black holes is very similar, we can now use this measurement to anchor our understanding of jets, whether they are from black holes 10 or 10 million times the mass of the sun,” Miller-Jones said.
“With radio telescope projects such as the Square Kilometre Array Observatory currently under construction in Western Australia and South Africa, we expect to detect jets from black holes in millions of distant galaxies, and the anchor point provided by this new measurement will help calibrate their overall power output.
“Black hole jets provide an important source of feedback to the surrounding environment and are critical to understanding the evolution of galaxies.”
The international collaboration also included researchers from the University of Barcelona, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Lethbridge and the Institute of Space Science.
Want to see more stories from trusted news sources?Make Space Connect a preferred news source on Google.