Our Galaxy's Monster Black Hole Is Spinning Almost As Fast As Physics Allows

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: The colossal black hole lurking at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is spinning almost as fast as its maximum rotation rate. That's just one thing astrophysicists have discovered after developing and applying a new method to tease apart the secrets still hidden in supermassive black hole observations collected by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The unprecedented global collaboration spent years working to give us the first direct images of the shadows of black holes, first with M87* in a galaxy 55 million light-years away, then with Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our own galaxy.

Their results show, among other things, that Sgr A* is not only spinning at close to its maximum speed, but that its rotational axis is pointed in Earth's direction, and that the glow around it is generated by hot electrons. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that the magnetic field in the material around Sgr A* doesn't appear to be behaving in a way that's predicted by theory. M87*, they discovered, is also rotating rapidly, although not as fast as Sgr A*. However, it is rotating in the opposite direction to the material swirling in a disk around it -- possibly because of a past merger with another supermassive black hole. The findings have been detailed in three papers published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. They can be found here, here, and here.

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