Atomic Faceplates- Cygnus X-1 Faceplate

The first black hole anyone ever proved was real.

In 1964, a rocket-borne X-ray detector swept across the sky and found something that shouldn't have been there — a source of X-ray emission so intense it couldn't be explained by any known stellar process. They called it Cygnus X-1. It was the first X-ray binary ever catalogued. And for a decade, no one could agree on what it was.

Stephen Hawking bet Kip Thorne it wasn't a black hole. In 1990, he conceded the bet. Cygnus X-1 is a black hole — roughly 21 solar masses, pulling material from a blue supergiant companion star at a rate that generates temperatures in the millions of degrees. The accretion disk glows. The jets extend light-years. The event horizon swallows everything that crosses it and returns nothing.

In long-exposure photography, the Cygnus region runs deep violet — the ionized hydrogen of the surrounding nebula — with gold and amber at the shock fronts where energy meets interstellar gas. The colors of something violent, seen from a safe distance.

The Cygnus X-1 Faceplate captures that palette in a deep violet faceplate with gold iridescence. The iridescence shifts with the angle of light, the way the accretion disk changes character depending on where you're standing relative to the jet.

• Deep violet with gold iridescence
• Color shifts with viewing angle
• Compatible with iPod Classic 5th generation

21 solar masses. One event horizon. No return.