In a stunning new finding, scientists have confirmed that the first black hole ever seen on camera is spinning.
The famed doughnut-shaped M87* black hole, which is 6.5 billion times more massive than the sun, first garnered notice in 2019 when it became the first vacuum to be photographed.
The M87* black hole is now proven to be spinning, but astronomers have yet to determine how quickly. On September 27, the news was made.
M87* has been detected by a network of radio telescopes for the past two decades. It’s in the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, some 55 million light-years from Earth in the Virgo constellation.
This is due to gravitational interactions between the black hole and the material that makes up the disk around it
The black hole’s monitoring equipment has detected a tremendous jet of radiation and particles being ejected from its poles. Observed over decades, the relativistic jets appeared to be on a kind of pendulum that swings every 11 years, according to scientists.
Experts believe this is due to gravitational interactions between the black hole and the material that makes up the disk around it. They claim that this provides “unequivocal evidence” that the black hole is rotating.
Cui Yuzhu, the study’s lead author and a researcher at Zhejiang Lab in China, said in a statement, “We are thrilled by this significant finding,” adding, “Since the misalignment between 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.”
Their findings agreed with computer calculations, demonstrating that the jets emitted by the black hole change direction every 11 years by about 10 degrees.