Lijun Gou

TL;DR: In this article, the authors used an extensive collection of optical photometric and spectroscopic data taken from the literature to obtain a full dynamical model of the binary system, and found a black hole mass of 14.8 ± 1.0 M�, a companion mass of Mopt = 19.2 ± 2.9 M� and the angle of inclination of the orbital plane to our line of sight of i = 27.1 ± 0.8d eg.

TL;DR: In this paper, the inner radius of the accretion disk with the innermost stable circular orbit is identified, whose radius depends only on the mass and spin of the black hole.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used a fully relativistic accretion disk model to analyze hundreds of spectra collected during eight X-ray missions that span 26 years and found that to within 2% the inner radius of the disk is constant over time and unaffected by source variability.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors measured the radius of the inner edge of the black hole's accretion disk by fitting its thermal continuum to a fully relativistic model of a thin disk.

TL;DR: In this paper, the first black hole was discovered using a direct and accurate measurement of the distance to the X-ray binary Cygnus X-1 from a trigonometric parallax measurement using the VLA.