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Far-away black hole spins at half the speed of light
A team of astronomers is the first to directly measure the spin of a distant supermassive black hole that is about 6 billion light years from Earth and 7.7 billion years old. Published in the journal Nature, the findings offer insights into how black holes and their host galaxies grow and change over time, researchers say. “We estimate that the X-rays are coming from a region in the disk located only about three times the radius of the event horizon—the point of no return for infalling matter,” says Jon Miller, associate professor of astronomy and another co-author on the paper. “The black hole must be spinning extremely rapidly to allow a disk to survive at such a small radius.”
Shown: multiple images of a distant quasar are visible in a combined view from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. (Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ of Michigan/R.C.Reis Optical: NASA/STScI)
http://www.futurity.org/black-hole-spinning-half-speed-light/
A team of astronomers is the first to directly measure the spin of a distant supermassive black hole that is about 6 billion light years from Earth and 7.7 billion years old. Published in the journal Nature, the findings offer insights into how black holes and their host galaxies grow and change over time, researchers say. “We estimate that the X-rays are coming from a region in the disk located only about three times the radius of the event horizon—the point of no return for infalling matter,” says Jon Miller, associate professor of astronomy and another co-author on the paper. “The black hole must be spinning extremely rapidly to allow a disk to survive at such a small radius.”
Shown: multiple images of a distant quasar are visible in a combined view from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. (Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ of Michigan/R.C.Reis Optical: NASA/STScI)
http://www.futurity.org/black-hole-spinning-half-speed-light/
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