Black holes suck everything that draws near its gravitational pull and in it, the environment feels like a vacuum. But what happens when a huge black hole spins at half the speed of light?
The crumbs left over from a supermassive black hole's recent meal have allowed scientists to calculate the monster's rotation rate, and the results are mind-boggling. The huge black hole, known as ASASSN-14li, is spinning at least 50 percent the speed of light, research team members said.
"This black hole’s event horizon is about 300 times bigger than the Earth," study co-author Ron Remillard, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a statement. (The event horizon is the limit beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole's gravitational clutches.)
"Yet the black hole is spinning so fast it completes one rotation in about two minutes, compared to the 24 hours it takes our planet to rotate," Remillard added.
ASASSN-14li was discovered in November 2014, after it tore apart a star that strayed too close. This dramatic event caused a flash of bright light, which was spotted by a system of optical telescopes called the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (hence the black hole's name).
(Image credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/D. Pasham et al: Optical: HST/STScI/I. Arcavi via Space)
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