March 9, 2013

Artistic concept of a supermassive black hole (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Two space telescopes, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuStar) and ESA’s XMM-Newton, were used together to measure for the first time the spin rate of a black hole. The object of the study is the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy NGC 1365, which according to findings spins at near the speed of light.