Thanks to two X-ray space telescopes, astronomers may now be able to unravel the mystery behind a supermassive black hole's growth and evolution.
NASA's X-ray telescope NuSTAR teamed up with the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton space telescope and found a black hole anchoring nearby galaxy NGC 1365, sitting about 56 million miles away and containing the mass of 2 million suns, is spinning at 84 percent of the maximum possible rate, according to a study released Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"In this way, the black-hole spin is a 'fossil remnant' of its formation processes," Christopher Reynolds, an astronomy professor at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the study, wrote in an editorial accompanying the Nature paper.
Since scientists cannot see the black hole themselves, they look for the effects its spin has on the accretion disc, the surrounding ring of gas and dust. They study X-ray lights reflected from the inside edge of the disc to see whether space time has been twisted or not.
However, scientists reveal that since the X-rays are of very low energy, they are not sure whether the twisting takes place due to the black hole's spin or is it simply a distortion from layers of gas blocking the X-ray light's path.
"If you were standing near the event horizon of this particular black hole, you would have to turn around because your space-time is twisting," NuSTAR lead scientist Fiona Harrison, a Caltech astrophysicist, said at a news conference. "You would be turning around once every four minutes just to stand still."
