New research shows that black holes spin, answering a key question about the nature of supermassive black holes.
Schematic representation of the tilted accretion disk model. “The black hole’s spin axis is assumed to align vertically. The jet’s direction is almost perpendicular to the disk. The misalignment between the black hole spin axis and the disk rotation axis triggers the precession of the disk and jet.” | Credit: Yuzhu Cui et al. 2023, Intouchable Lab@Openverse and Zhejiang Lab
The research team has been led by Dr. Cui Yuzhu, a postdoctoral researcher at Zhejiang Lab, a research institution in Hangzhou. “We are thrilled by this significant finding,” says Yuzhu. “Since the misalignment of the black hole and the disk is relatively small and the precession period is around 11 years, accumulating high-resolution data tracing M87’s structure over two decades and thorough analysis are essential to obtain this achievement.
The massive accretion disks and jets, observed for over a century, have long puzzled physicists. It has long been theorized that the mechanism could rely upon energy resulting from a spinning black hole. However, the spin of a black hole, perhaps the most essential characteristic of a black hole when explaining how it appears to function, has never been directly observed before.by a different team of scientists, as seen below.
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