This is the Speed of a Black Hole’s Spin and It Will Blow Your Mind

Amaze Lab

Supermassive black holes are one of the universe’s greatest mysteries, however scientists continue to chip away at their unknown properties more and more all the time. Now, in a cosmic first, astronomers say they have finally calculated the speed in which one of them swirls.

Transcript

00:00supermassive black holes are one of the universe's greatest mysteries however scientists continue to

00:09chip away at their unknown properties more and more all the time and now in a cosmic first

00:14astronomers say they have finally calculated the speed in which one of them swirls the black hole

00:19in question resides around a billion light years from our solar system and experts at mit were

00:24able to observe the moment it began to devour another object this caused a flare of light to

00:28be released as the disk of devoured material spun and wobbled on its axis the mit researchers say

00:34this allowed them to calculate the spinning speed of the supermassive black hole itself and it's

00:38actually quite slow they found it was spinning on its axis at less than a quarter of the speed of

00:43light that's still extremely fast however other studies looking at non-supermassive black holes

00:48revealed they spun pretty close to the speed of light black holes are difficult to observe because

00:52the speed needed to escape their extreme gravitational pull is faster than the speed of light the upper

00:57speed limit of anything that's why astronomers must observe black holes when they devour other objects

01:02and those objects release light before their material passes over the event horizon or the point of no

01:07return experts say this new data will help them develop new theories about how black holes evolve

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