Thursday, October 30, 2003
Milky Way's black hole is in a spin
A "supermassive" black hole lurking at the centre of our galaxy is rotating at great speed, according to research published in British science weekly Nature today.
The dark leviathan, known as Sagitarrius A* (abbreviated to Sgr A*) lies about 26,000 light years from Earth, at the heart of the Milky Way.
German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, spotted a powerful flare of infrared radiation that leapt from the maw of the black hole and lasted 30 minutes, in May this year.
On a second observational run the following month, his team noted another flare, which lasted 85 minutes with peaks at 14 and 17 minutes. That was followed by an identical flare the following day at a slightly different location.
Genzel's theory is that this regular occurrence points to radiation surges from blobs of gas captured near the black hole's lip, which is memorably known as the "event horizon."
"If the (17-minute) periodicity arises from relativistic modulation of orbiting gas, the emission must come from just outside the event horizon, and the black hole must be rotating at about half of the maximum possible rate," the authors said.
Sgr A* is estimated to be 3.6 million times the mass of our Sun, which makes it small by "supermassive" standards. Other "supermassives" spotted at the core of other galaxies are up to 1,000 bigger.
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