Astronomers have recorded black hole castings, one of the two most critical black holes. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory indicates that this black hole rotates slightly over most of its young cousins.
This massive black hole with an accurate rotation rate provides tips on how some of the world’s most prominent black holes grow.
Giant black holes contain millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun. Astronomers estimate that nearly every GalaxyGalaxy has a massive black hole in the center of its center. Although large black holes are indisputable, scientists are still working to understand how they grow and evolve. Another vital piece of information is how quickly the black holes turn.
“Every black hole can be defined by only two numbers: its spin and its weight,” said Julia Sisk-Reynes of the Institute of Astronomy (IoA) at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., who led a new study. “While that sounds simple, finding those standards in most black holes has been very difficult.”
With this result, the researchers detected X-rays jumping on a disk of material around a black hole in the quasar known as H1821 + 643. Quasars have fast-growing black holes that produce large amounts of radiation in a small area around a dark hole. Located in a galaxy of about 3.4 billion light-years from Earth, the black hole of H1821 + 643 is between a staggering 3 billion and 30 billion solar stars, making it one of the largest known. In contrast, the giant black hole in the center of our GalaxyGalaxy weighs four million Suns.
The strong gravitational force near the black hole converts X-ray intensity into different forces. If the change is significant, the disk’s inner edge must be very close to the point where no black hole is returned, known as the event horizon. Because the rotating black hole takes up space through it and allows the object to rotate closer to it than is likely to turn, X-ray data can show how quickly the black hole spins.
“We found that the black hole in H1821 + 643 rotates about half faster than most black holes weighing between one and ten million,” said co-author Christopher Reynolds, also of IoA. “The question of a million dollars is: why?”
The answer may depend on how these giant black holes grow and change. This slow spin supports the notion that larger black holes like the H1821 + 643 grow more significantly in combination with other black holes or that gas is drawn unexpectedly when its large discs are disturbed.
