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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.
I thought this title was held by White House press secretary Tony Snow...
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
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.
We know it won't fly apart from centrifugal force.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
If there was a planet with a gravitational pull equivalent to a Black Hole, I bet they'd find it pretty quick.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
The astrophysics arXiv preprint from June.
In theory, that could be a time machine... anyone know the details of the math?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
People, what we have is a model, not an observation. As TFA says, this model is based on assumptions, though fewer assumptions in the past:"Now, astronomers have measured the spin of a black hole with a new method that requires fewer assumptions."
The black hole may indeed be spinning at 1000 revs, or is might just be that one of the model assumptions is invalid.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So the question is, whos grave is it and what did we do to get them to spin that fast?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
...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).
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
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.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
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.
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?
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make install -not war
I for one, welcome our new extremely dizzy overlords.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
A 747 could easily be deflected with BBs. The velocity and quantity of BBs is the most relevant factor. A billion BBs would deflect a 747 pretty easily. Or maybe just a handful of BBs at 2/3 the speed of light.
"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
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