NuSTAR
Supermassive black hole found to rotate near speed of light
The rotation of a supermassive black hole (SBH) has been definitively measured for the first time by combining x-ray data obtained by the x-ray space telescopes XMM-Newton (soft x-rays) and NuSTAR (hard x-rays). The SBH at the center of a galaxy called NGC 1365 was found to be spinning at 84 percent of the maximum speed allowed by general relativity – or roughly speaking, the edge of the black hole is rotating at 84 percent of the speed of light. Read More
Black holes, which abound in the Universe, convert matter into geometry – the larger the amount of matter that disappears through the event horizon, the larger they grow, with the only external sign of their presence being the warping of space due to their gravity. In the process, a great deal of extremely hot gas is generated, and that gas emits hard x-rays. Now NASA's NuSTAR space telescope can find black holes by forming high-resolution images of the cosmos in hard x-rays. Read More
