Evidence for a Spinning black hole detected by scientists

The Event Horizon Telescope has captured the first direct evidence of a black hole spinning thereby providing new insights to one of the universe’s perplexing celestial objects.

These observations focus on the massive black hole that is present at the centre of the Messier 87 galaxy which neighbours our Milky Way. The shadow of this supermassive black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope. Similar to other black holes, M87 also has powerful jets that are launched from the poles at close to the speed of light into open space.

There have been predictions that the rotation of a black hole is what powers the jets to be launched at such high speeds; however, there has been no concrete evidence till date.

"After the success of black hole imaging in this galaxy with the Event Horizon telescope, whether this black hole is spinning or not has been a central concern among scientists." said Dr Kazuhiro Hada, of the national astronomical observatory of Japan. "Now anticipation has turned into certainty. This monster black hole is indeed spinning."

This supermassive black hole is 55 million light years from earth and is sized 6.5 billion times our sun. Just beyond the black hole, an accretion disc of gas and dust swirls on the edge of the cosmic sinkhole. Some of the matter that falls into this black hole will vanish forever; however, a percentage will be expelled from the poles of this cosmic sinkhole at speeds greater than 99.99% of the speed of light.

A model suggests that the spin of the black hole is responsible for this phenomenon. Scientists believe that the charged particles present in the disk of the black hole produces a strong magnetic field and as the black hole spins this field produced is dragged with it. This quintessentially winds the field in a manner that it can accelerate away from the black hole as jets, thereby extracting energy from the black hole during this process.

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Source: Devlin, Hannah. The Guardian. "First evidence of spinning black hole detected by scientists". https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/27/first-evidence-of-spinning-black-hole-detected-by-scientists. 27/09/23. [Date accessed: 28/09/23].

Edited by: Ansh Pincha