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.

Comments

Is that fast enough for closed timelike curves?

[Dr. Manhattan]

In theory, that could be a time machine... anyone know the details of the math?

why spinning it good

[ILuvRamen]

They didn't mention it in the article but thankfully I'm a black hole expert :-D There's a theory that says since the singularity is infinitely small then technically no matter is actually moving when it's rotating so it doesn't have to obey the speed of light speed limit and may be able to rotate faster than the speed of light. No idea how they can measure the speed if there's no radius but anyway, if it gets up to that speed they theorize that it will completely stop emitting gravity and either just sit there or explode, but most likely just sit there. This is the only known (well, in theory) way to "destroy" a black hole so when one comes and sucks up Pluto, thus ending that stupid debate, and is heading for Earth, we can just shoot particles into it at the correct angle and it will absorb the kinetic energy and translate it into spin and eventually spin so fast it effectively isn't dangerous anymore :)

Makes sense to me...

[e4g4]

...some astronomers have expressed doubt that stars would be spinning fast enough at this stage in their lives.

Now, i'm not an astrophysicist, but it seems to me that if a star had any spin at all before collapsing into a black hole, that spin would be magnified quite substantially, to conserve angular momentum (y'know, like a figure skater, or you spinning on your office chair).

Uh, I hate to burst your bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no genius in physics, but I thought the only way you could measure the absolute speed or position of something (at least on the sub atomic level) is to bounce another particle off of it (light, electron, quark, whatever) (and never both at the same time). Same applies to larger objects in every day life, where you typically just bounce light off them.

So how the hell do you measure the rotational speed of a black hole, when by definition every particle you shoot at it gets sucked in never to return?

This When to the Egress

[Doc Ruby]

Some astrophysicists say that some spinning cylindrical black holes warp spacetime enough that a projectile moving through its nearby region gets its velocity rotated to travel through time instead of a spatial axis. Is this new one the longest wormhole yet found?

Re:One thing is for sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Who knows?"

People who work with general relativity... black holes have a maximum rate of spin (in a similarly counter-intuitive way that relative speeds can't be faster than light), and a maximally-spinning* black hole is theoretically known to be stable. Now we have good evidence that they exist in nature we can be very confident in the theory.

*Experts: I'm talking astrophysical maximum, as in Thorne (1974).

Squished apart

[jbeaupre]

If I remember correctly, centrifugal force as we know it actually reverses near a black hole. Pulling inward instead of outward. A rotating black hole may be compressed further by its rotation. Maybe someone familiar with the phenomena can shed more light.

Re:One thing is for sure.

[Pharmboy]

Let's take a leap...

Being an armchair physicist, I was wondering what *if* the hole was spinning almost the speed of light (>99.999%) at the horizon, then wouldn't the centrifugal force almost equal the gravitational force at the horizon? Enough that the horizon would shrink ever so slighly (or via Uncertainly Principle), making something that was once inside, now outside? Discounting for "quantum hair", even a couple of photons escaping would disagree with the theory "Whatever falls in a blackhole can't escape". At the very least, this would be an acceleration of the "evaporating black hole" theory.

Now we take this a step farther, and what if you CAN shrink the blackhole just a fraction, then INFORMATION about the blackhole is gained from photons that were once inside and now outside, without them being virtual particles. Yes, this rather violates what we think we know about the physics of blackholes, which is very little.

It is entirely possible that I am just too ignorant to fully understand these concepts and missing something. Interesting though.

Multi-Dimensional Universe

[writerjosh]

"A lot of research is focusing on creating an opening into the higher dimensional Hyperspace that contain innumerable universes. If it can be done, our whole world will change. We will leap forward in the advancement of science and technologies by millions of years.

Every black hole has a central singularity. These are points where mathematical modeling fails. That is because we assume every thing is 3-D. But the fact of the matter is these centers of black holes are singularities in 3-D but are actually simply transition points in higher dimensions..." [source]

Whoa

Re:Orbiting at no more than 30 miles from the cent

[BB101]

Don't black holes drag space time around with them? So relative to an observer they are going faster than c, but relative to the space they occupy they are not.