V404 Cygni is a black hole binary system located about 7800 light years away from Earth. The black hole is actively pulling material away from a companion star (with about half the mass of the Sun) into a disk around the invisible object. This material glows in X-rays, so astronomers refer to these systems as "X-ray Binaries." In 2015, Swift discovered a burst of X-rays from V404 Cygni. The burst created high-energy rings from a phenomenon known as light echoes. Instead of sound waves bouncing off a canyon wall, the light echoes around V404 Cygni were produced when a burst of X-rays from the black hole system bounced off of dust clouds between V404 Cygni and Earth. A team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin recently analyzed Swift and Chandra observations of the system. The rings tell astronomers not only about the black hole's behavior, but also about the landscape between V404 Cygni and Earth. The observed light echoes appear as narrow rings rather than wide rings or haloes because the X-ray burst lasted only a relatively short period of time.