LOS ANGELES — There’s a new spin on supermassive black holes: They’re incredibly fast, astronomers say.
It has long been suspected that gigantic black holes lurking in the heart of galaxies rotate faster and grow larger as they feast on gas, dust, stars and matter. But there hasn’t been a reliable measurement of the spin rate of a black hole until now.
While black holes are difficult to detect, the region around them gives off telltale X-rays. Using NASA’s newly launched NuStar telescope and the European Space Agency’s workhorse XMM-Newton, an international team observed high-energy X-rays released by a supermassive black hole in the middle of a nearby galaxy.
They calculated its spin at close to the speed of light — 670 million mph.
So how fast is the black hole at the center of our Milky Way spinning? It’s tough to know because our galaxy’s supermassive black hole isn’t as active as the observed one, said lead researcher Guido Risaliti of Italy’s Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory.
