More than 60 years after it was first spotted, Cygnus X-1 — the first confirmed black hole — is still full of surprises. Researchers have finally measured the energy output of this behemoth's "dancing jets," and the results could help answer wider questions about the extreme behavior of black holes, experts say.

Cygnus X-1 is a stellar-mass black hole that is around 21 times more massive than the sun and located approximately 7,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Cygnus. It is locked in a binary orbit with an equally massive blue supergiant star dubbed HDE 226868, which it circles every 5.6 days at a distance of 0.2 astronomical unit (one-fifth the Earth-sun distance). The black hole is constantly ripping away its partner's outer layers into a superhot ring of swirling matter called an accretion disk, which shines brightly in X-ray light.