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Fastest Spinning Black Hole Ever Found
brian0918 writes, "NewScientist reports that researchers in Cambridge have detected a black hole spinning at nearly 1,000 times per second — the fastest ever recorded. From the article: 'McClintock's team examined a black hole in our galaxy called GRS 1915+105, which lies about 36,000 light years away. They found the innermost stable orbit around GRS 1915 is so close that the black hole must be spinning at nearly 1000 times per second. The finding supports the idea that only fast-spinning stars can collapse to create powerful explosions called long gamma-ray bursts.'" The Astrophysical Journal abstract is open but you have to be a subscriber to read the full article there.
The original article is from The Astrophysical Journal and I'm not sure if you can read this but I'll link it here. I have an account so that may be unreachable, if it is try the PDF of it or the abstract. I often enjoy reading the original article no matter how large and complex it is. If anything, it causes me to look up more terms so that I feel like I'm learning something.
My work here is dung.
If there was a planet with a gravitational pull equivalent to a Black Hole, I bet they'd find it pretty quick.
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The astrophysics arXiv preprint from June.
because they don't use light to detect either, they use the effect on nearby matter; which means their gravity, and not their size/light is what matters. Although someone mentioned that black holes also have a kind of "halo", which could also still be used. Also there is an accretion disk (I believe that's what it's called), around a black hole where stuff is getting sucked in. That would create a large and visible effect.
Nonetheless, a planet will make a star vibrate ever-so-slightly-and-slowly, whereas a black whole will make who masses of stuff rotate around it, and suck them in.
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If you'd like to see the whole article, as published in the Astrophysical Journal, you can find it on the astro-ph journal pre-print server. It's not the "official" journal version, but it should be identical to it (and was submitted to the preprint server by the authors).
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.