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NASA Supermassive-Black-Hole Gravity Discovery: “Confirms Einstein’s Theory of Space-Time”
Thursday, February 28, 2013 13:42
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Two X-ray space observatories, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, have teamed up to measure definitively, for the first time, the spin rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our sun that lies at the dust- and gas-filled heart of a galaxy called NGC 1365 (image above). Measuring the spin of a supermassive black hole is fundamental to understanding its past history and that of its host galaxy. The observations are a powerful test of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which says gravity can bend space-time, the fabric that shapes our universe, and the light that travels through it.
The supermassive black hole is spinning almost as fast as Einstein’s theory of gravity will allow. The findings, which appear in a new study in the journal Nature, resolve a long-standing debate about similar measurements in other black holes and will lead to a better understanding of how black holes and galaxies evolve.
