Space and astronomy news
Pick any object in the Universe, and it is probably spinning. Asteroids tumble end over end, planets and moons rotate on their axes, and even black holes spin. And for everything that spins, there is a maximum rate at which it can rotate. The black hole in our galaxy is spinning at nearly that maximum rate.
For objects such as the Earth, the maximum rate of rotation is defined by its surface gravity. The weight we feel while standing on the Earth isn’t just due to the gravitational pull of the Earth. Gravity pulls us toward the center of our world, but the Earth’s rotation also tends to fling us outward away from the Earth. This “centrifugal” force is tiny, but it does mean that your weight at the equator is just slightly less than it is at the north or south pole.
With our 24-hour day, the weight difference between the equator and pole is just 0.3%. But Saturn’s 10-hour day means that the difference is 19%. So much that Saturn bows outward a bit at its equator. Now imagine a planet spinning so fast that the difference was 100%. At that point, the gravitational pull of the planet and its centrifugal force at the equator would cancel out. If the world were to spin any faster. it would fly apart.
For black holes, things are a bit different. Black holes aren’t objects with a physical surface. They aren’t made of material that could fly apart. But they still have a maximum rate of rotation. Black holes are defined by their tremendous gravity, which distorts space and time around them.
This brings us to a new study on the rotation of the supermassive black hole in our galaxy. The team looked at radio and X-ray observations of the black hole to estimate its spin. Due to the frame-dragging of spacetime near the black hole, the spectra of light from material near it is distorted. By observing the intensity of light at various wavelengths, the team was able to estimate the amount of spin. What they found was that thevalue for our black hole is between 0.84 and 0.
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