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?

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).

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?

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