Turns out... really fast.
Covered in an AP story via the local paper hereL http://www.twincities.com/allheadlines/ ... tudy-finds
Also behind a paywall in Nature at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 11938.html
I looked up NGC 1365. Turns out it's in Fornax, so I guess I'll have to look for it sometime during a trip south. December trip to the Virgin Islands, anyone?
Article: How fast does a Supermassive Black Hole spin?
- Ricola
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- Dick Jacobson
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Re: Article: How fast does a Supermassive Black Hole spin?
This seems to imply that the black hole was created by the merger of two giant black holes. Must have been a really spectacular event, if you like locomotive collisions. Too bad we can't set up a high-energy x-ray telescope to study the results.
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20-inch homemade equatorial Newtonian with periscope
14-inch homemade equatorial Newtonian
10-inch Newtonian that folds flat
6-inch Russian Maksutov-Newtonian on Vixen equatorial mount
Too many small scopes and binoculars to mention
- Dave Venne
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Re: Article: How fast does a Supermassive Black Hole spin?
I was trying to understand how the unit of spin was a speed (miles per hour)...instead of revolutions or radians per second, so I hunted up something with a little more science content.
If I can get any of this into my head, it looks like the spin of a black hole modifies nearby space in a way that changes the local speed of light, which in turn changes the character of the radiation emitted by matter orbiting the black hole in that area. So measurements of that radiation can be used to infer the amount of distortion, which in turn suggests what the rotation speed is.
Sometimes I think that knowledge itself has an event horizon and that I'm on the wrong side of it.
If I can get any of this into my head, it looks like the spin of a black hole modifies nearby space in a way that changes the local speed of light, which in turn changes the character of the radiation emitted by matter orbiting the black hole in that area. So measurements of that radiation can be used to infer the amount of distortion, which in turn suggests what the rotation speed is.
Sometimes I think that knowledge itself has an event horizon and that I'm on the wrong side of it.
- Ricola
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Re: Article: How fast does a Supermassive Black Hole spin?
I am certainly on the wrong side with you.Dave Venne wrote:...Sometimes I think that knowledge itself has an event horizon and that I'm on the wrong side of it.
Thanks for the additional link.
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Re: Article: How fast does a Supermassive Black Hole spin?
I'll rephrase your post as a question. We can find the actual speed if we write an equation including the mass and distance of the stars around it at multiple intervals radially going outwards from the center of the galaxy, and the speed at which they go. Toss in the speed of light, mass of the black hole, a gamma to radio wavelength telescope the size of Jupiter, a 473 terapixel CCD cooled to absolute zero, a new highly advanced version of calculus not discovered by humans, and 83 trillion more dollars to CERN, and then you can calculate the speed of the black hole... But, we haven't discovered that calculus yet, so I'll approximate; a supermassive black hole spins... fast.
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